Blog # 12, resuming the blog by dates....
Scarlet Johanson has gas
Spending a few hours with
Tamer Nafar, the hip hop artist for the group DAM, (see the incredible documentary, Slingshot Hip Hop) is
always a trip. The drive to Lyd where he lives involves passing Ben Gurion
Airport, built on the lands of Lyd, speaking of dispossession. Lyd is a “mixed
city” with an ancient bloody and complicated history without any of the touchy
feely reconciliation stuff that “mixed” may imply today. I always think it should
be called a “mixed up city.” The place consists of Palestinians (excuse me we
are in Israel so they are officially Arabs) and a mix of Jewish Ethiopians,
Moroccans, and other Jews from lower socioeconomic groups. We are on a bus touring the area and Tamer
never seems to age; he reminds me of a tiger about to pounce; he speaks his
mind freely, crackles with sarcasm and energy and has no verbal sensors, (in
keeping I suppose with being a well-known hip hop artist!) though he seems a
bit tamer now that he has a wife and son.
Parenthood will do that.
We see more blaring signs
on busses: “Bring back our boys!” The political frenzy is heating up and I fear
what is coming. We start in a
dusty, run down center near the Great Mosque where Palestinians were first
rounded up in 1948 and massacred by the Stern Gang. 130 people died and one survived buried under the corpses.
The mosque was closed until 1994.
Tamer remarks that an Israeli reporter noted that the walls of the
reopened mosque were washed, but the blood soaked floor was just covered with
carpets. And to think I grew up knowing that Jewish soldiers only fought noble
and moral wars; we did not massacre, we protected women, children, and fruit
trees, we learned from our history….. the making and unmaking of founding
mythology is powerful challenging work.
Tamer reviewed much of
the city’s history and the various neighborhoods and their related ethnicities
and socioeconomics, (no surprise, the whiter the Jews, the more services,
sidewalks, clean streets, the more Arab, the less of everything). If we look at today, he sees the main
Zionist dilemma is one of demography. The cry now is to build a new “clean”
city, “Yehud Lud,” bring in the extremist Jewish settlers, (some from Gaza,
some from France) and place them in the middle of Palestinian neighbors.
Palestinians facing poverty, hostile Hassids, and little hope are faced with
selling their properties to these settlers or to the drug dealers that dominate
many of the neighborhoods. These
are not good choices. And thus the
Palestinian presence is steadily disappeared. Part of a Jewish apartment
complex is located on a Muslim cemetery, so Tamer can no longer visit his
father’s grave. According to
Tamer, approximately 90% of the funding in Lyd is budgeted to build housing for
Jews. He notes ironically, that of
$12 million, $2 million is for Jewish schools and services, $2 million for
Jewish neighborhoods, $6 million for a separation wall (!) in the city, and $2
million to demolish Arab houses. Trends?
The neglected poorer
parts of the city are infested with drug dealers, (he points out one with an
“ATM” ie a hole in the wall where you put your shekels and get your drugs, I
did not try it even in the interests of journalism) and the only rehab center
used to be owned by a drug dealer whose son committed suicide and then the
father changed his tune. Mostly
folks are using crystal meth, coke, and pills; the dealers are often Arabs and
Bedouin clans, as Tamer says, “not a tasty salad.”
The confounding disaster
is of course racism. Tamer
explains that intellectually he feels sympathy for Ethiopian Jews who are also
on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder; but then he “has to be fucked over
by an Ethiopian (Jewish) policeman who is trying to be soooo Israeli.” Recently
there was a scandal when it was found that hospitals were throwing out blood
donations from Ethiopian donors and that Ethiopian women were being sterilized
without consent. Racial purity
anyone?
With his family and a
successful music career, Tamer has moved to a nicer neighborhood; his son is attending
an Arabic preschool and speaks fluently
The parents are now teaching him Hebrew at home; after all he does need
to speak the language of the colonizer. Tamer fears that if he went to a Jewish
pre-school, he would lose his Arab identity. These are tough issues to negotiate.
We meander towards the
“wrong side of the tracks” where there is a railroad station, originally built
by the British for Palestinian workers. Now the neighborhood is only visited by
junkies, police, and settlers, “They have the country, we have the streets.”
This impoverished shanty town is limited by a nearby Moshav (a Jewish
community), the train tracks, a highway, and a Jewish neighborhood. While there are successful doctors, and
lawyers, there is mostly lots of poverty and unemployment. These folks are not
accepted in Jewish neighborhoods, 150 Palestinian houses (remember all citizens
of the great democracy of Israel) have been demolished due to lack of permits, but since these
are unrecognized neighborhoods there is no system to apply for anything, not
that that would work anyway. And
each group blames the group less fortunate: Ethiopians and Moroccans are part
of the problem and they blame the Palestinians. It would create about half a million shekels to create a
public housing system and plans, it takes the same amount to demolish one
house.
Tamer notes this whole
insanity is actually about Judaizing Lyd. He quips that the Jews are always
complaining that the Palestinians want to throw them into the sea, but in
actuality it was the Jewish forces who pushed the Palestinian civilians into
the Mediterranean. Tamer’s
grandfather was” thrown into a boat” in 1948 and there are plenty of historical
photos that document that frantic expulsion.
But there is a
bureaucracy to racism and Judaization. Palestinian land was declared “frozen”
and cannot be developed. Ten years ago, Jewish Russian neighborhoods were built
on frozen land with full infrastructure and no permits. They received their retroactive permits
two years ago.
And then there are the
railroad tracks, all eight of them, 250 trains a day, We hold our breaths and
watch kids scamper across the tracks as the lights flash and the rails come
down. Well before 2006, there were
no lights and no guard rails, some 15 children were killed. Tamer made a video
with the late Juliano Mer Khamis (actor and founder of the Jenin Freedom Theater),
and took Israeli rock stars to this neighborhood with the media in tow, creating
intense public pressure, and poof, lights and guard rails. Can you imagine such a situation in a
posh neighborhood in Tel Aviv. But
then they would have moved the train tracks…..The promised pedestrian tunnel or
bridge has yet to materialize, but no one else has been crushed by an oncoming
train. I counted four trains in
the few minutes we had this conversation.
We head into a dirt path,
concrete walls, corrugated metal walls and roofs, piles of trash, open
sewerage, bedding hung in the sun, purple bougainvillea flaunting itself. Where
are we? A shanty town in Brazil? South Africa? A ten-ish year old girl offered
our bus driver a nice drug purchase. Israel the big success story, the start-up
nation, the light unto the nations? This is shameful.
One positive development
Tamer explains is that at the site of a previous demolition a new shiny school,
the Ort School Science and Engineering, has been built, his wife teaches here,
the principal is an Arab. She describes herself as apolitical, but she knows how
to work the system, she is well respected, she goes out on the streets and
talks to the drug dealers, and she gets excellent results. All of her students
are Palestinian.
Our final stop is the
Shamir neighborhood, a Palestinian area adjacent to a moshav that demanded a
separation wall of their own to protect them from the unwelcome Arabs.
Activists took them to court and they said it was a an acoustic wall due to the
trains (not), then the wall was partially built for seven to eight years. A
beautiful multi-story Palestinian apartment building was built in the
neighborhood without a permit (obviously since there are no permits), and some wierd
deal was made, not to demolish this apartment building in exchange for
completing the separation wall. A very weird legal system indeed.
I ask Tamir, who is this
strange mix of high energy, outrage, and cynicism, what are the main barriers
for the Palestinians digging themselves out of this economic, drug trafficking mess
and he replies: “Our tribal mentality.” (It seems we are all suffering from our
tribal disorders, only mine has all the big guns.) But Tamir continues the good
fight, pushing the boundaries, getting in everyone’s face, calling things as he
sees them in all their contradictions and ugliness and sarcasm. He is releasing English language hip
hop songs: “Mama, I fell in love with a Jew,” and “Scarlett Johanson has gas,”
(a reference to the Soda Stream campaign she promoted, Soda Stream is produced
in an illegal Israeli settlement). He is planning a full album and is writing a
script on Palestinian hip hop. And he is using his powerful music and his sharp
tongue to continue to create political change and wake up the international
community through the language of hip hop.
I leave both inspired and
appalled at the consequences of the Zionist dream: of the price of privileging
Jews over everyone else, white Jews over brown Jews, of the self-destruction of
communities that are pushed to the edges of society, of the terrible cost of the
racism that has always been part of the fabric of this contradictory place.
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