Tequ’a and Umm al-Ara’is by David Shulman

August 2, 2014


David Shulman is a professor at Hebrew University and a peace activist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dean_Shulman
 

            Dizzy from the dissonance. In the felafel shop off the main street in Tequ’a, the TV is perched high on the wall in the corner. News from Gaza in Arabic. A mother lies on a hospital cot, her face pocked with a hundred tiny, and some not-so-tiny, red wounds, probably from shrapnel. She cannot speak, keeps fading off into sleep (let us hope it’s not death). Beside her, a two-year-old child is crying, hopeless, holding her hand, looking at her face. The young owner of the shop scoops balls of chick-pea mash from a vast mountain of it in front of him, sets them afloat in the boiling oil of a deep black cast-iron fry-pan. When they are ready, he takes them out one by one and, one by one, stacks them with precision in a row along the wide circular rim of the pan. He is an artist. He loves his work and he is happy to feed us. We have come back with the village elders from an afternoon in the newly stolen fields. He welcomes us with the gentle grace that defines Palestinian hospitality.

            It’s the best felafel I’ve ever tasted. Two tinted glass chandeliers hang from the ceiling over the white plastic tables and the black plastic chairs. Outside, on the main street, a tractor rolls past. Young men in black shirts come in to serve us. They carry themselves with the dignity of the Mediterranean male. They smile. When we are finished and ready to leave, I go to thank the owner, I tell him it was wonderful. “To your good health,” he says. “You must come again.”

            Peace. One hundred kilometers away, Jews and Palestinians are killing one another with the happy ferocity of hyenas and the gloomy self-righteousness of monotheists. The dissonance makes me dizzy. If here, why not there? “It could be there, too,” says Guy.

            Why Tequ’a? For the usual reason. After the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli boys, Israeli settlers, backed up by ultra-right politicians, announced the “appropriate Zionist response.” They have set up Tekoa V—three miserable caravans, a few flags. The caravans sit in the middle of what was once a cultivated field. To the west, hills of stone, a swirl of yellow and brown. To the east, the desert, white and gray. In the distance, the blue hills of Moab, across the river. What is left of the field is level and cleared of stones.

            It was hard work getting the owners of the land to come with us today. They’re afraid. These fields and grazing grounds abut on the settlements of Tekoa IV and Nokdim. It’s dangerous to come here. Guy and Ezra have both been savagely beaten by settlers in these parts. Ezra warns me today: there’s a 50% chance that we’ll be attacked by settlers or soldiers or both, anyway they’re all the same.

            We walk down the long rocky slope beside rusty barbed wire fences under a doomsday sun. We come to a halt a few dozen yards above the caravans. We know the soldiers will come, and they do, first one jeep, then two more. Two soldiers clamber up the hill to accost us. Ezra has ordered me to talk to them, to give them a short lecture about this place.

            “Who’s responsible here?” they ask.

            “No one is responsible, but I’m ready to speak to you.”

            “What are you doing here?”

            “We came with the owners of this land to see what is happening.”

            “You’re not planning to come down into the settlement?”

            “No. But you should know that it’s illegal, an act of state-sponsored theft.”

            “All I know is that the Supreme Court granted a two-week extension before demolishing it.”

            “True. That’s how all the settlements started. Just wait. And what do you think about all this?

            “Think? I’m wearing a uniform, so I don’t have to think.”

            But they’re not harsh or scornful or superior, just hot and bored. More keep coming up the hill. For once they make no attempt to drive us away. They tell us we can have our protest, they won’t interfere. Guy argues with them a little, but they don't seem interested. I talk with Daniel, who is studying philosophy at University College London; this year he took a second-year course in Ethics. I say to him that it must be interesting to move from that into Practical Ethics on the Ground. It’s all here, before our eyes.

            Maybe we’ll slowly persuade the owners to come back with their goats and sheep, to let us help them here and in the courts, and maybe they’ll even get the land back. We’ve had some luck before in Tequ’a. But you can already see, right here, the whole cancerous process at its initial stage. It begins with a caravan or two, and then the Supreme Court, responding to an appeal by right-wing politicians, lets them stay on, and the bureaucrats start funneling money, and before you know it they’re connected to the water and the electricity grid and they have their own little squad of soldiers to protect them and they can now proceed to bully and attack and humiliate the Palestinians whose land they have taken. Look at Tekoa IV, just over there.

            Meanwhile, there’s a war on; maybe it’s winding down, for now. Things are hot in the territories, and many places are, for the moment, out of reach. Nasser, from Susya, called this morning to tell us that under no circumstances can we go into Yata today. At Umm al-Ara’is the standard sequence played itself out. We marched with Sa’id and the ‘Awad clan to the edge of their fields. The soldiers produced their signed order and attached map of the Closed Military Zone. Amitai ignored it, boldly marched into the heart of the wadi and sat there serenely on a rock until the soldiers came to arrest him. One of them threatened him, saying that one day he’d rape him in a back alley in Tel Aviv. But most of these soldiers—reservists-- were relatively mild today. Gabi asked one of them if he didn’t feel something in the face of the women and children whom he was driving away. The soldier said: “I don't have feelings.” Gabi said, “That’s when you’re in uniform, but I’m sure when you take the uniform off you do have feelings.” The soldier said, “No, even when I’m not in uniform I have no feelings.”

            I guess that sums it up. The whole story of Israel is enfolded in that inner deadness. It’s evident in the way the war has gone in Gaza, too. You can do anything if you’re dead inside. You can kill children and not notice. What has happened to the Jews? Once we were light and witty and self-deprecating and terribly vulnerable and we used our minds and our hearts to survive, and now we’re heavy and earnest and speak mostly in the language of threats and coercion and, these days, revenge. There are huge posters in Gilo, as you enter Jerusalem from the south, quoting the bloodthirsty verse from Psalms 18:38: erdof oyevai ve-asigem ve-lo ashuv 'ad kalotam, "I will pursue my enemies and overcome them and I will not come back until I have exterminated them." I like some verses of the Bible better than others.

            Sometimes I weary of the whole sorrowful, surreal concoction. At Umm al-Ara’is, after the ritual was complete, Amitai played soccer with the Palestinian kids; the ball kept getting kicked downhill into the deep desert. Sometimes it also got kicked into the forbidden fields. No one seemed to care. Soccer on the brink, with everyone present, playing their part:  Sa’id, dignified as always, and the ‘Awad people, still fighting to get back their lands; the settler thieves who stole them, uphill in Mitzpe Yair; the soldiers who are there to protect the settlers; us, who have come to confront the latter and to help Sa’id and his people; the birds and clouds and the raging sun, watching from above; the goats in their pens, the wheat threshed on the old stone threshing-ground in the khirbeh, golden in the midday light; the ravaged fields in the wadi, by now, at the height of summer, baked to a crisp. I think the dizziness started then, before we left for Tequ’a.

            And then there are the not-so-small miracles that also happen. Some new volunteers have joined us, including a young woman, Noa, from a moshav near the coast who, I discover, has somehow found Ta’ayush and, more important than that, has found, against all odds (or maybe she always had), the unthinkable gift of thinking for herself, resisting the communal brainwashing at high tide now during the war. God exists.

Palestine: The Hatred and the Hope by David Shulman

I interrupt the India 2014 posts to point to two posts by a professor in Hebrew University, a Jew.   My father and he are professional colleagues.  It is so heartening to read this in the midst of the deafening narrative in the US media that has no room for nuances and presents only the war between two entities, in a tone that is partial to the Israeli right wing view.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/aug/02/palestine-hatred-and-hope/?insrc=hpbl

Prices

The Times of India I read on the flight to Bangalore discussed price spikes of onions.  The Star of Mysore I read on arrival in Mysore talked about increased price of vegetables.  They were all close to Rs. 100 per kg.   I bought some oranges and mosambies at Rs. 100 a kg each.   You get about 4 of each for half kg, meaning each fruit is about Rs. 12.50.

Later that evening I was in a department store A to Z.  It is modeled on department stores in the west, albeit in a much smaller space, and carries everything from soaps to packaged snacks to groceries.  I observed with interest familiar brands like Oreos, KitKat, and Knorr soup concentrates.   An Oreo packet with about a dozen of the well-loved cookies was Rs. 20.  KitKat had smaller sizes to suit varied budgets in India (exemplified in articles and books like ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’).  The typical size that costs 50 cents in the US cost Rs. 20, a packet half that cost Rs. 10, and a packet half that cost Rs. 5.  This meant that a maidservant’s daughter could probably afford a KitKat treat at times.  That's good.

It also meant that a KitKat indulgence was more affordable than an orange or mosambi indulgence.  A Knorr soup concentrate packet was Rs. 52 (with multiple vegetables, onions and tomatoes in concentrate form), the price of half a kg of one vegetable.

This was a real change.  When I was growing up, an orange was probably 25 paise, while a Cadbury bar was Rs 5.  Chocolates were expensive and out of reach.  Everybody bought vegetables and fruits for everyday use, and chocolates on rare occasions (maidservants not at all).  While fruits and vegetables (along with salaries) have gone up 50 to 100 times or more, chocolates seem to have gone up only by 4-5 times.  This seemed to similar to the situation in the US.  (I had been extremely surprised when I landed in the US to find chocolate prices on par with vegetable and fruit prices and the more processed food it was, the cheaper it seemed to be. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that the poor are obese rather than being thin as sticks, and cheap processed food was one of the reasons.)  

Everything in India has gone up.   But processed and packaged foods seemed to be holding their own.  Is it because of efficiencies in production?  And that it is easier to maintain packaged foods when compared to fresh foods?  That is the explanation in the US.  But in India vegetables and fruits are local, don’t have to travel from afar, and don’t have to be preserved for a long time.  This is puzzling.  Was Cadbury that expensive when I was growing up because there was no competition, or are they keeping the prices low now because of efficiencies in production?

The impact of the high prices for pulses and vegetables is obvious when you order dosas at any small hotel – the sambhar has no toor dal, no vegetables.  It has some onions and tomatoes, occasionally potatoes, and I don’t know what is used to thicken the gravy.  The rava dosa price at these hotels has not gone up – a special rava masala dosa is still Rs. 45.   Is it the competition keeping prices down (there are tons of eating places of this kind) and they have to manage their margins by using less and less dal and vegetables?

First Impressions

This will likely read like fluffy and superficial to some, with the tone of a visiting NRI.  But I believe First Impressions have value, denoting the initial reaction to things we see and the people we meet (and of course, immortalized by my favorite Jane Austen).

By the time we travelled the distance from Bangalore airport to Mysore road, from outside the northern tip of the city to the south, I was tired of the traffic.  It was fairly early in the morning (around 7.00am), but the bustling and teeming roads seemed already full.  I was happy to think of Mysore, happy that it was a smaller city, and happy that I didn’t live in Bangalore and did not plan to do so in the future.

The Bangalore-Mysore highway was also very busy, and the road bumps meant many slowing downs and picking up speeds.   As always the highway was lined with plenty of eating establishments.  The smaller road side establishments were still visible, but more visible were larger, newer, establishments. One was a nice vegetarian restaurant called ‘Adigas’ proudly proclaiming that they were part a chain.  (What surprised me most was the ‘we are hiring’ sign out front looking for everyone from cooks to dishwashers in a new branch they were opening somewhere.  Surely finding people, especially unskilled workers, required practically no advertisement – didn’t the workers at existing branches have relatives they were desperate to get hired?  Also, the sign was in English.)  Most other newer establishments included ‘wine’ and ‘bar’ in their signboards.   There were also wine shops which I am going to guess sell alcohol (not just wine). 

As we got close to Mysore, huge billboards advertised a variety of luxury accommodations, appealing eating places, and jewellery stores.  After we got home to Kuvempunagar and made trips to shops as we got settled in, some of these themes were obvious.  Wine (alcohol), umpteen eating places, jewellery stores, a new store selling meat, lots of new bakeries (selling decent looking cakes in addition to the traditional vegetable puffs and sweets) summed up the businesses that thrived in Kuvempunagar.  All of this does indicate wealth and changing patterns of spending.   I think I was most surprised by the number of jewellery shops, all within a few blocks of Kuvempunagar.

We had dinner at a local small restaurant, with crisp rava onion dosas and Indo-chinese food on the menu.  Yummm.   There was what looked to be a head waiter, several junior waiters, and low down the totem pole, the table cleaners.  They took dirty plates away and cleaned tables, but only the waiters served food.   As has universally been the case the table cleaners are young.  The boy who cleaned our table would have been in class IX or X, if he had been in school.   He was probably from a nearby village, and had to drop out of school or was forced out.  To my eyes he was sad and tired, and clearly at the bottom of the hierarchy at the restaurant.  The tip was pocketed by the waiter, and we had no easy way to tip the table cleaner.  As I was leaving India after my last trip a year ago, I had eaten at a restaurant in Bangalore where the table cleaner was about 10 or 11.  In spite of everything including the Right to Education Act, the meal I had when I left and the meal I had when I came back had this in common with my restaurant meals growing up - young, overworked, underpaid table cleaners.  And this is in Bangalore and Mysore, two relatively well-to-do cities.

 

However prosperous Mysore becomes, the lower ranks seemed to be always filled in with people ready to do any job.  Though some people had probably climbed into the lower middle, middle middle, and upper middle classes and were frequenting the jewellery shops and bakeries and wine shops it did not translate to job vacancies at the lowest levels – people just came in droves from around to fill them up.  I don’t hear of any difficulties in middle class homes finding maid servants.  I doubt the restaurant has any trouble finding table cleaners (notwithstanding the ‘we are hiring’ sign at Adigas).  And, there seems to be always people in temporary blue tarp tents – I have not yet figured out what these migrant workers do.  The blue tarps are around in vacant lots (mostly public) for a few days/weeks and then they disappear.  One year I heard they were digging ditches for fibre-optic cables.

India 2014

At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to capture experiences from my visit to India in writing, as a blog.  I intend to share this only a small group of family and friends.   Some of my observations might come across as naive and inexperienced to folks who live in India; however, my experiences are valuable to me, and perhaps of interest to the small group I intend to send this to.

And I enjoy the writing.