A national carrier without a state? Palestinian Airlines, the national carrier of a stateless Palestine, has resumed flights after a seven year absence. Flying from Al-Arish, an Egyptian port city in the Northern Sinai, to Amman, the airline is reportedly sold out for the next two months.

Yesterday, I spoke about the airline, its history (did you know one of their first planes was donated from Saddam Hussein’s private flight?) and what the airline might mean for the nascent Palestinian state with Monocle news editor Tom Edwards on the Monocle Daily. Included in the interview were select clips with Palestinian Airlines director General Ziad Albad which were completed in his Ramallah office.

You can listen, stream, or download this interview here (Episode 143, interview begins at minute 43:25) 

Hummus, a chickpea dish from the Middle East, is slowly becoming popular in the West.  Eaten throughout Middle Eastern countries, Hummus has special significance in Israel and the Palestinian territories where both Israelis and Palestinian enjoy the filing dish as a centerpiece of their day.  In my latest piece for Monocle 24′s The Menu, I visit two humus restaurants, one in Tel Aviv and one in Ramallah to find about the differences and similarities of this beloved food.

As Hummus gains popularity in cities from London to New York, there will surly be renewed interest in its origins in the Middle East. For the adventurous food traveler, seeking out the small Hummus places that hid in forgotten ally’s of West Bank cities and near the beaches of Tel Aviv can be a satisfying and delicious way to explore the cultural differences which exist between Israelis and Palestinians.

You can listen, stream or download this episode of The Menu (Episode 30) by clicking here. 

The Palestinian economy is characterized by a reliance on huge sums of international foreign aid – they are one of the largest recipients in the world. But where exactly this money gets spent is not always so obvious. In a small town just outside the boundaries of Jerusalem, a construction project is nearing completion which has been funded by the president and emir of the United Arab Emirates, Shiekh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan. When finished it will be one of the largest mosques in the Middle East,  and it’s raising questions among local residents about the role and necessity of donor aid in the West Bank, as I report in my latest audio piece for Monocle 24.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Khalifa mosque exudes excess in a area which is otherwise characterised by a lack of municipal services. The 25,000 residents of  the small town have access to only one underequipped  health clinic. For some, it’s an example of the complexities and contradictions often underlying the donor aid which pours into Palestine. And while on one hand the mosque will bring prestige and beauty to the town of Azaiyah, critics may be left wondering whether other very real problems faced by the area are being ignored

You can listen, stream or download the piece here (Episode 139 Minute 101:00)

The Bauhaus style is one of the most important contributions to the field of architecture in the 20th century. While the functional buildings tend to dot the outer boroughs of European cities from Berlin to Prague, the city of Tel Aviv has the densest collection of Bauhaus buildings in the world. In 2003, UNESCO recognised the importance of Tel Avivian  Bauhaus and designated the Middle Eastern city a world heritage site.  Advances in architecture and natural population growth are presenting a problem for city planners who are struggling to preserve the Bauhaus character of the city as I found out in my latest piece for Monocle 24′s Section D.

Functionalist Bauhaus architecture came out of an experimental relationship with modernism in the early 20th century. The city of Tel Aviv, a modern European city in the heart of the Middle East, is also a product of this radically bold period of change. Understood as an architectural treasure, a tourist attraction and world heritage site, Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus is a profoundly vibrant monument to modernism.  Its slow decay is yet another reminder of our increasingly growing disinterest in the modernist foundations of contemporary society.

Listen or download this piece here (Episode 30). 

The development of Modern Hebrew literature is full of contradictory and competing narratives of national identity. The bespectacled Jewish writer, carrying with him the traditions of biblical Hebrew literature as he negotiates the fast-paced capitals of Europe, narrowly avoiding anti-Semitism lurking around every corner, is thinking of Palestine. The Modern Hebrew novel features protagonists who address themes steeped in land, sun, sweat; literature is understood as an extension of the project of building a new state.

Yet, there are Hebrew writers who kept their focus on Europe, or even the United States, and in the process modernized the ancient language for use in the secular world. One writer in particular, David Vogel, who has largely remained invisible in the United States, developed an Austro-Viennese literature in the Hebrew language free of nationalist themes and connotations: He is now credited by some in Israeli academia as playing a crucial role in the development of secular Hebrew literature—a pioneer of a modern Hebrew language unmoored from nationalism.

Two years ago, an Israeli scholar named Lilach Nethanel was riffling through the stuffy spaces of the Genazim, the archive of the Hebrew Writer’s Association in Tel Aviv. Researching a thesis about Vogel, Nethanel stumbled across what appeared to be an innocuous manuscript of Vogel’s classic 1934 novella Facing the Sea. The book, written in Paris in the early 1930s, tells of a young couple’s summer on the French Rivera. Awash in sun, sand, and sea, the book highlights Vogel’s lyrical talents as one of the 20th century’s greatest Hebrew poets while tackling the eternal complexities of romantic relationships.

As Nethanel inspected the handwritten manuscript, the descriptions of street lamps, a typical fixture of Vogel’s other novels set in Vienna, caught her attention. Struggling to decipher the tiny script, which lacked margins and required a magnifying glass to read, Nethanel realized that she was not reading Facing the Sea but an entirely new manuscript, one that scholars had speculated about but had actually never seen. An entirely original unpublished novel has been found in the quiet Genazim archive. Left untitled, the manuscript has just been published in Israel to much fanfare under the title Viennese Romance.

***

David Vogel was born in May 1891, in the city of Satanov, in what was then part of the Russian Pale of Settlement. Like others, he made his way to Vienna, where the smoke-filled cafés and anonymous bustling streets became a home for his largely futile writing habit. A former yeshiva student in Vilna, Vogel barely made a living by tutoring Hebrew in Vienna. While he had command of German, he was never able to write fluently in the language of his adopted home and was thus pushed to an existence on the periphery of the dominant cultural circles in the city.

The influence of European modernism on Hebrew literature has not received the proper treatment it deserves in Israel and the academic establishment, but this is changing. While Europe played a crucial role in the fermentation of Hebrew literature, most, if not all of the continent’s Hebrew-language writers ended up moving to pre-state Palestine. For some this was an ideological choice, while others fled to Palestine a step ahead of the Nazis. Yet it was in Europe that the first Hebrew-language novels addressing overtly sexual and psychological issues first began to appear. Free from Hebrew’s burden as a standard-bearer of Jewish nationalism, Jewish writers used the language as if it was German or French to create works exploring the individual’s place in the modern world.

In his recent book Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe, Shachar Pinsker, a professor of Hebrew literature at the University of Michigan, describes how Hebrew functioned for young writers’ mobility in Europe. What emerges from Pinkser’s research is a Hebrew literary canon free from ideology and infused with the Diaspora Jewish experience. David Vogel played a leading role in this development.

“In some ways, Vogel is like an early Woody Allen,” Pinkser told me recently at a windy outdoor Jerusalem café. “He was introverted, consumed with sexual hang-ups and lived as a perpetual outsider, a character closer to an American Jew than a Zionist pioneer.”

In 1929, Vogel was invited to Tel Aviv at the request of the Zionist federation with the special attention of the famed Hebrew writer and poet Uri Zwi Greenberg. So keen was Greenberg to have Vogel in Mandate-era Palestine that he had the federation take care of all of Vogel’s visas, not a small task at the time, and set him up with a comfortable position teaching Hebrew at the Herzliya Gymnasium, the most prestigious school of the period. Yet Vogel left Palestine after only a year, noting that the climate was too harsh for his taste.

“I think that he was not a Zionist but he was not an anti-Zionist,” Nethanel told me during a break from research at Tel Aviv University. “One of the modernist components of writers is that they were always one step removed. This is Vogel in virtually all aspects of his life, politically, theoretically, and in his love-life. He hated regular work and preferred to be poor than hold a steady job.” Upon returning to Europe, he was granted an Austrian passport that listed his profession as “writer.” With it, Vogel moved to Paris and continued writing until he was caught by French authorities at the outbreak of World War II. His story ends in a Nazi death camp sometime in 1944.

***

Vogel’s best-known novel, Married Life, is a snapshot of a tragic relationship in 1920s Vienna. Rudolf Gurdweill, a poor Jewish writer accustomed to spending his days writing in one of Vienna’s many literary cafés, marries Thea von Takow, an Austrian baroness. From the very start of their tortured relationship, von Takow showers Gurdweill with insults, sleeps with his friends, and attempts to have Gurdweill believe that their son was conceived with another man. Yet, Gurdweill deals with the abuse by finding solace walking the streets of Vienna with no sense of purpose or destination. Isolated in his sadomasochistic relationship and connection to Vienna, he barely takes note of Lotte Budenheim, a young Jewish woman who has fallen desperately in love with the aspiring writer. Consumed with her love of Gurdweill, Budenheim commits suicide after attempts to capture his attention. Death is a theme throughout the novel, which opens with Gurdweill passing the scene of a suicide and ends with the protagonist killing his wife.

Vogel’s newly discovered manuscript is also marked by suicide and death. Yet, unlikeMarried Life, the protagonist, Michael Rost, is a writer with a wealthy patron; he frequents Yiddish-speaking restaurants, and the objects of his desire, a mother and daughter, live with financial uncertainty. Focusing on the sexual, the book explores Rost’s passions in a shockingly blunt way. “Vogel made Rost completely unreflective,” Nethanel recently toldHaaretz. “He cast him as a hedonistic type, which he himself wanted to be.” She believes that the manuscript was an early autobiographical work—Vogel was himself involved in a mother-daughter romance—that was likely shelved in the mid-1920s.

For Vogel—the Jew in Europe, the non-Zionist in Tel Aviv, the Russian in Vienna, the Austrian in Paris—tortuous relationships are a literary device to explore his existence as an outsider. Taken together, Married Life and Viennese Romance demonstrate Vogel’s perspective on otherness. In Married Life, the alienated Vogel is content with an abusive relationship because of his ability to conceal himself in the enormity of 1920s Vienna and his writing. In Viennese Romance, Vogel casts himself in a comfortable financial position and in control of not one but two relationships.

His books lack strong Jewish markers, but, given their obsession with the outsider, they are incredibly Jewish novels. In Viennese Romance, the protagonist notes an encounter with a group of Eastern European Jewish immigrants on their way to Palestine. Vogel described their destination as a “barren wasteland in the Near East” and apparently made an attempt to erase the passage in his manuscript. This passage is clearly legible and made it to the final edited version of the book sold in Israel.

While Vogel’s work remains in print, it has always been one step removed from the larger trends in the development of Hebrew literature. In the late 1990s, a group of Israeli scholars at Berkeley and the Hebrew University re-engaged with Vogel’s work. This act of revisionism, as Pinkser put it, has led to a fuller debate about the existence of a Modern Hebrew literature free of nationalist connotations.

“He refused to be read in the context of nationalist Hebrew,” Nethanel told me. “He was always in a position of withdrawal. He lived in various cities—Vienna, Tel Aviv, Paris—but was always one step removed, never a full participant in the life of his given context. But more importantly, he understood how Hebrew would develop and he wrote for the future.”

Above all else, David Vogel was a writer whose work gave him the ability to transcend the nationalist passions consuming Europe and the Middle East at the time that he died. The discovery of an unknown Vogel manuscript serves as an eerie reminder that the regeneration of the Hebrew language was rooted in the life of the Diaspora.

Published in Tablet on 27 April 2012

Jerusalem is a branded city, perhaps the world’s first. But city planners, under the direction of a new mayor, are working hard to rebrand Jerusalem for its cultural appeal and downplay the political tension, which has become synonymous with the conflicted capital in recent years. Instead of ignore the political reality; some Jerusalemites would like to see it embraced by city branders. For my latest piece for Monocle 24, I asked Jerusalemites, both Palestinian and Israel, how they would like to see their city branded. What I found was a city in the middle of an identity crisis.

You can listen to the piece here (starts at minute 24:00 but try to catch the entire program) or, my personal favourite way of listening to Monocle 24, download the podcast directly from iTunes.

Fadi Quran’s first memory of the Israeli occupation is the Second Intifada. Ramallah, the de-facto capital of the West Bank and Quran’s home town, was under military curfew for weeks on end. Unable to buy necessary food staples because of the constant presence of Israeli tanks and soldiers, Quran’s family was literally starving. Driven by childhood immaturity and anger, Quran would collect trash in large boxes and place the boxes at the entrance to his neighbourhood. Suspecting the mysterious packages were bombs, the Israeli military would send in advanced robots to inspect the bags of trash. The operation would take hours, giving Quran’s neighbourhood valuable time to run out and resupply groceries before the tanks and soldiers returned and the curfew resumed.

There are no more curfews in Ramallah but for Quran the occupation is still a facet of his daily life. He relayed his childhood experience as we drove to the Qalandia checkpoint, the unofficial Israeli border between Ramallah and Jerusalem, which he is barred from crossing. For many Palestinians, Qalandia, with its imposing guard towers and military jeeps, is the physical embodiment of Israel’s control over their lives. Last May, 23-year-old Quran, along with other young political activists staged a massive demonstration at Qalandia. The goal of the demonstration was to enter Jerusalem but they were stopped by a hail of Israeli bullets and tear gas canisters.

The blue green mountains of the West Bank, the physical landscape of the Bible, have slowly transformed since Israel’s conquest of the territories in 1967 from idyllic rolling mountains into a series of disjointed hilltop Israeli settlements, settler only highways and Israeli checkpoints. The contrast between Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements is stark. The villages lazily fit into the landscape, often using mountaintops as protection from the harsh winds which rattle the area year round. Israeli settlements, in an audacious demonstration of their presence, sit squarely on mountains tops. Connecting these far flung villages and settlements are a system of roads and checkpoints which are constantly, relentlessly monitored by Israeli military jeeps.

Twenty four year old Diana Alzeer was almost born at an Israeli checkpoint. During the First Intifada, Alzeer’s village of Salafit, which sits quietly below Ariel, one of the largest settlements in the West Bank, was under constant curfew. As she went into labour, Alzeer’s mother was stopped at the entrance to the village by soldiers. While in labour, she was forced to sneak around the checkpoint, running through a ravine to a main road, until she reached a family friend who drove her to a local hospital.

Born during the First Intifada and raised in the Second, Alzeer has been living in Ramallah for the past four since completing a degree in journalism at Bir Zeit University. She is intimidating despite her petite appearance . When you begin talking about the state of Palestinian activism, her small frame barely conceals her fiery rhetoric and a litany of grievances she has with the current politics in the West Bank.

Alzeer and Quran are emblematic of the next wave of Palestinian activism in the Occupied Territories; young, energetic and disconnected from Palestinian party politics and inspired by the Arab Spring. Hidden from the news cycle of endless peace negotiations and fears of impeding violence in the region, non-aligned political activists are perfecting forms of civil disobedience, which they believe will form the backbone of the next chapter in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Rural villages dotting the rugged landscape of the West Bank, which have been directly affected by Israel’s controversial Separation Barrier, are a rallying point for a nascent popular resistance movement in the Occupied Territories.

In 2003 at the height of the Second Intifada, when bombs were exploding in Tel Aviv cafes and the Israeli military was imposing curfews throughout the West Bank, an unassuming Palestinian village named Budrus began a non- violent campaign against the Separation Barrier’s construction on its farmland. According to the Israeli government, the barrier needed to be placed inside of Budrus to ensure security of nearby settlements. After two years of almost daily non-violent demonstrations, some of which saw Palestinian women standing directly in front of working bulldozers, the Israeli military made an unprecedented decision to change the route of the barrier. Ninety- five percent of the farmland in Budrus, which would have been swallowed by the barrier, was saved through noncompliance and popular resistance. The Popular Struggle – the umbrella term for current non-violent resistance movement in the West Bank – had its first victory.

Ayed Morrar is the man who led Budrus to its historic non-violent victory. A lifelong member of the Fatah party until he recently quit over recent attempts by the Palestinian Authority to take control of the Popular Struggle movement, Morrar was active as an organizer during the First Intifada in the late 1980’s. The ‘Intifada of stones’, as many Palestinians call it to differentiate from the armed struggle of the Second Intifada, was marked by mass protests, civil disobedience and boycotts of Israeli goods in the Occupied Territories. It was a far cry from the suicide bombers and the violence which typified the Second Intifada.

For his role as a community organizer and a member of the outlawed Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Morrar spent seven years in Israeli jails. It was during his time in jail that Morrar’s outlook on armed resistance transformed. While armed resistance remained a legitimate form of resistance according to international law,
Morrar realized that non-violent resistance was the better vehicle to achieve Palestinian independence because it demonstrated the Palestinian cause as oppressed people who needed international support. The power imbalance and the occupation are displayed when Palestinians do not use violence.

Morrar is an unusually modest man given his reverence among Palestinian activists stemming from his pioneering role as a community organizer in the West Bank. His family home, which sits overlooking a swallow ravine filled with olive trees, is carefully adorned in typical Palestinian style; three floors with a lavish greeting room reserved for guests and nothing else. Unlike most Palestinian homes, Morrar’s greeting room includes awards from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for his non-violent leadership.

“After Budrus, many villages throughout the West Bank adopted our model of non-violence,” Morrar noted after offering small cups of sweet Arabic coffee. “People at the time understood that our issue is about freedom and
not about economic or establishment issues. When the First Intifada took place in 1987, our economic, social and political situation was better than now. During the First Intifada and in Budrus in 2003, people were not looking for more money or to build a state. The main issue was, and is, freedom.”

The model of non-violent resistance which Morrar championed in Budrus is still present in the West Bank. Every Friday afternoon, after the midday Islamic prayer, a diverse array of Palestinian villagers, international supporters and Israeli peace activists gather in windswept village squares across the West Bank before confronting the Israeli military. Each village has a different story but the issue is always the same; the slow confiscation of land by Israeli settlement infrastructure.

One wet and windy Friday, in the village of Quroyt, just south of the ancient city of Nablus, Diana Alzeer joined other activists in protesting the expansion of the nearby Israeli settlement of Shiloh into the village’s farmland. The demonstration began with spirited calls for Palestinian unity but quickly took a confrontational tone when the activists were face to face with the soldiers.

The tenacity of Alzeer during the demonstration is staggering. She leads chants, her voice cracking as she demands an end to the Israeli occupation. One villager offers her a bullhorn which she stubbornly rejects, preferring to continue with a strained voice.

After nearly a decade the demonstrations have a relatively choreographed sequence; peaceful protests devolve into crowd control and stone throwing. Activists march towards contested lands and are stopped by a blockade of Israeli jeeps and soldiers, ready to break up what they consider to be illegal riots. According to the Israeli military, all protests must be coordinated with the military governor, who holds the sovereign authority to grant demonstration permits. Since 1967, few permits have been issued for any type of Palestinian demonstration.

Alzeer is everywhere. She runs to the front line and speaks in English with soldiers about her right as a Palestinian to be on her land before renewing chants and leading the 200 protesters forward towards the contested land recently swallowed by the settlement. She barely has enough time to collect her thoughts and tweet live updates to her thousands of followers on the popular social networking platform Twitter.

Out of nowhere, the first volleys of tear gas rain down on the protesters. A settler security guard arrives and fires live rounds into the air, sending the protesters into a panic. Some Palestinian youth take advantage of the chaos and start throwing rocks at the soldiers. Alzeer quickly runs to the back of the demonstration bemoaning its sudden turn to violence. Within an hour, the army and the rock throwing protesters have exhausted their desire to continue with the exchanges. The demonstration is declared over by villagers. But the day is not finished for Alzeer and her fellow activists from Ramallah. Before returning home, they decide to stop in the tiny hamlet of Nabi Saleh, just west of Ramallah, where a similar demonstration has entered its fifth hour.

The group of tired activists survey the scene in Nabi Saleh; the non-violent protest has already been broken up and Palestinian youth are now engaged in a game of tit-for-tat with Israeli soldiers. Occasionally clouds of tear gas envelop the area eliciting coughs and gasps of air.

Alzeer tweets the number of arrested and injured before commenting that the Israeli military spokesperson is calling the protest a violent riot on Twitter. They are claiming that we are violent rioters, she announces to her fellow activists, but they are not talking about how the soldiers started this cycle of violence by firing rubber bullets inside houses throughout the village

Standing in front of the Separation Barrier meters away from the Qalandia checkpoint, Fadi Quran describes the primary challenges that his movement faces in Palestine. “The question is how we are going to speak to the core social and economic needs of average Palestinians,” he notes looking across the wall at the now defunct Palestinian airport which sits on the other side. “We need to tie the social and economic to the political reality on the ground. This is a challenge but not a challenge for people in villages like Nabi Saleh, who have had their land taken by settlements.” He continued, “They see it; the link is obvious between the settlement taking their land, and their poverty. But in places like Ramallah and a lot of cities in the West Bank, it is not obvious anymore.”

The March 15th movement is a loose collective of urban activists who share Quran’s vision of transforming the Palestinian struggle. The movement emerged last year in Gaza and quickly spread to the West Bank as a Palestinian response to the Egyptian revolution. Rebuilding Palestinian national identity, which has been badly damaged by the last six years of internal division between Fatah and Hamas, has been the driving focus since its inception. Activists living in major cities who regularly travel to village protests decided to bring the reality of the occupation into the heart of Ramallah, a city often compared to Tel Aviv for its disconnected lifestyle. During one of their first protests in solidarity with the Egyptian people, plain clothes Palestinian Authority police officers arrested and beat a number of activists.

Despite its portrayal in the West, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not well liked in the West Bank. Set up in the 1990s as part of the Oslo peace process, the PA was designed as an interim governing authority for Palestinians. Most Palestinians believe that the current Fatah dominated PA is corrupt and ineffective. Fadi Quran claims that the March 15th movement does not target the Palestinian Authority but aims to develop a new way of fighting the occupation, through noncompliance, mass protest and non-violence. “At the moment, in Palestinian history and the history of the region, popular resistance and civil disobedience are the necessary tactics that should be used and at this moment in time they are the only tactics that we have to achieve freedom, justice and peace for all.”

Quran and Alzeer do not confine their activism simply to protesting and organizing. Quran recently returned to Ramallah after completing a degree in engineering and international relations at Stanford University. He is working on a start-up green energy company which will bring wind electricity to Palestine, thus lowering Palestinian dependence on Israeli energy, which is provided at inflated prices to the residents of the West Bank. Alzeer is similarly involved in an organization she believes to be helping the Palestinian people. She is the chief media officer of the Central Elections Committee- the independent observer of Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza. For the new generation of Palestinian activists, activism can’t be divorced from daily life.

Non-violence as a tactic is a striking component of the March 15th platform. Western observers have long wondered why Palestinians have not adopted forms of non-violent resistance on a larger scale. The commonly held position states that if Palestinians adopted such tactics, then the West would quickly and wholeheartedly rally behind the Palestinian struggle. According to activists, non-violence has been employed for years but is often overshadowed by attacks on Israeli civilians by radical political factions. “As Palestinians, we tried armed resistance during the Second Intifada, apart from the fact that I do not agree with it in any way, it only got us backwards,” Diana Alzeer noted in her modest Ramallah apartment, the evening before a demonstration. “We did not move forward.”

Ultimately, Fadi Quran argues, the role of activists must be to make Israel’s occupation as difficult as possible to manage, using every non-violent tactic at their disposal. In a conflict where one side is at a great disadvantage in regard to power relations, symbolic acts of non-compliance are perhaps the only way of inflicting significant damage. “The only thing that really puts pressure on the Israelis throughout history in terms of their relationship with Palestinians, has been acts of civil disobedience like those of the First Intifada. It forced the Israeli government to give concessions to the Palestinians.”

Informed by the history of the Palestinian struggle, Alzeer and other young activists are challenging the status quo of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time when the world is counting on the next chapter of the Arab Spring to play out in Palestine. Last May, thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria and hundreds of March 15th activists in the West Bank gathered at Israeli borders and checkpoints to mark the anniversary of the Nakba- the Arabic word for Catastrophe, which Palestinians use to commemorate the creation of the state of Israel. Since the Second Intifada, Israel has created a myriad of borders and checkpoints to isolate and subdue Palestinians for security reasons. The idea of the March 15th activists was simple; hold symbolic mass protests at these border crossings and checkpoints to remind the Israelis of their presence.

Many people in the West Bank, not just activists, speak of the First Intifada as a crowning achievement of unarmed Palestinian resistance. The problems facing Palestinians currently, they argue, often vociferously, are numerous barriers designed to prevent another mass unarmed resistance. The Israeli army, Israeli settlers, internal division between Fatah and Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority’s perceived allegiance to Israeli interests are most often cited as preventing an honest manifestation of Palestinian will on the streets.

The influx of international donor aid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1994 is frequently cited as a factor in preventing open rebellion. The donor economy has created a generation of Palestinians unwilling to risk their relatively comfortable lives in the status quo which currently dominates the conflict. Their fears are not entirely irrational. After the United Nations statehood bid in September, USAID, the primary vehicle of American aid to the West Bank announced that it would cut half of its aid. The only programs that USAID now funds are connected to the Palestinian Authority security establishment.

Recently, the Israeli high court upheld a law barring West Bank Palestinians from marrying Palestinians with Israeli citizenship which live within the green line separating Israel from the West Bank. While walking along the Separation Barrier near Qalandia, Fadi Quran noted that the control which he faces every day has now been extended to love. If he were to meet a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, a system of laws and an eight meter high wall would end their relationship before it started. With nothing left to lose, Palestinian activists are coalescing around non-violence as a way of highlighting how the occupation has invaded every aspect of their lives.

In 1995, the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said wrote that the signing of the Oslo peace accords by Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat amounted to nothing more than surrender. Young Palestinians are fed up with surrender and with violent resistance. They are inspired by their own Palestinian history and energized by the revolutionary climate
in the Middle East. Although peace is clearly desired among activists, their immediate concern is their lack of human rights. A simple protest against the slow confiscation of land by Israeli settlements is a last ditch attempt to demonstrate that there are some in Palestine who reject violence in order to highlight their dignity under fire.

The power of civil society to affect change in the Middle East is the lasting contribution of the Arab Spring. But for Palestinians, civil society has been affecting change since the beginning of their struggle. The problem, as activists understand it, is the corrosive influence of party politics, the reliance on armed resistance against a formidable military, and division. The last twenty years of endless peace negotiations and sporadic cycles of violence have been the worst for Palestinians in terms of their abject loss of their rights. It is only a matter of time before the majority again takes the lead of the activists.

“We taught everybody in the Middle East how popular resistance works,” Ayed Morrar said. “In the First Intifada, before Facebook and Twitter, while the Arab people were in a deep sleep, we taught them how to resist. Now we see real examples of people achieving their freedom in front of us and the price of our freedom is not more than their price. We are ready to pay this price.”

Published in German GQ in March 2012

During the last days of the peace talks in 2001, Israel’s then-prime minister Ehud Barak is rumoured to have informed former president US Bill Clinton that Israel had no intention of relinquishing sovereign control over Jerusalem and delineating clear borders around the holy city. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem, Mr Barak purportedly told Mr Clinton, were an unfortunate reality that Israel would deal with in due time.

More than a decade later, Israel is demonstrating exactly how it intends to deal with the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. The strategy has a number of fronts: dispossess Palestinians through the creation of national “heritage parks” that lay claim to land through archaeological speculation; deprive Palestinian areas of necessary municipality services; and deny almost every building permit required for natural Palestinian growth in the city. In short, take as much land as possible while making Palestinians’ lives as difficult as possible.

These tactics have been successful throughout the West Bank for nearly 45 years, especially in the impoverished areas around Hebron. Yet, there is another element that Israel is employing in Jerusalem, one not commonly found in Israel’s colonial practices in the West Bank. The Israeli court system has been called upon to review cases claiming Jewish ownership over properties in East Jerusalem before Israel’s 1967 annexation.

Settlers, supported by significant funding from US non-profit organisations as well as Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, have demonstrated that some houses were owned by Jews before Israel controlled the territory. The settlers demand to return to these properties and the court system provides them with a legal justification to do so. Palestinians are being forcibly evicted from their homes, often for the third time since 1948.

While the process has a legal veneer, the application of this precedent is, of course, not extended to Palestinians who wish to return to homes in West Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa which were taken in 1948.

Court-sanctioned land confiscation in East Jerusalem received enormous media attention in 2009, when a group of Israeli settlers took over three houses in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The neighbourhood forms part of the “holy basin of Jerusalem”, the areas directly surrounding the old city to the north, east and south.

An increased Jewish population in the holy basin makes a two-state solution with East Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital a virtual impossibility by cutting off the old city from the rest of the West Bank. Israel has placed settlers throughout the holy basin to ensure a Jewish presence dividing the old city and the rest of the West Bank. To control the holy basin is to control Jerusalem.

Aside from sharply but carefully worded statements from the United States and the European Union deploring the unravelling of the Oslo peace process, the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah went off without a political hitch. Settlers remain in the houses today and the majority of the Israeli public remains ambivalent or supportive of the policy. After the evictions in Beit Hanina last week, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told reporters to expect more evictions in Sheikh Jarrah soon.

But there was one unforeseen development in the takeover of Sheikh Jarrah. Palestinians, embracing the idea that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violence, began to demonstrate with unlikely supporters: Israelis.

The story of this partnership is the subject of a new short film, My Neighbourhood, produced by Just Vision, the production outfit responsible for the successful 2009 documentary Budrus, about a West Bank village’s struggle against the Israeli separation barrier. The film (which I worked on as an assistant producer) premières at the Tribeca Film Festive this week and will be showing on Al Jazeera English until the end of the month.

My Neighbourhood follows Mohammed El Kurd, an exuberant young boy from Sheikh Jarrah, as he experiences the dramatic changes happening around him. When Mohammed turned 11, Israeli settlers moved into part of his house. Mohammed’s playset now sits in front of the settler entrance to his house.

When nonviolent protests started in Sheikh Jarrah three years ago, Mohammed befriended a number of Israeli activists including Zvi Benninga, a medical student from the other side of Jerusalem. The relationship between Mr Benninga and Mohammed, political and across generations, succinctly captures the human element all too often lost in the relentless political agendas typical in coverage of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem remains the beating heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The systematic land reallocation and continuing Palestinian expulsions are perhaps the best examples of Israeli policy in historic Palestine over the past 60 years. Yet, as My Neighbourhood demonstrates, not all Israelis and Palestinians buy into the hysterical rhetoric of their respective leaders. In fact, increasing numbers prefer to embrace non-traditional methods of co-habituation and nonviolent resistance to combat the sinister forces which surround them.

Published in The National on 25 April 2012

On my first trip to the West Bank, I was struck with a strange sense of familiarity. I left my apartment in Jerusalem and set off driving south, passing Bethlehem on my left and Israeli settlement blocks on my right. Driving through the Occupied West Bank, I stopped at an Israeli petrol station, just like the ones in my neighbourhood. I stopped at an Israeli national grocery chain and was almost apprehended by Israeli traffic police for speeding as I rejoined the well-maintained road. Despite the fact that I was in the middle of Occupied Palestinian Territory, I felt as though I was still in Israel and, according to the Israeli legal system, I was.

On the surface, every sector of Israeli society, except religious settlers and the military establishment, understand the occupation to be an ephemeral security measure necessary only in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Likewise, many in the international community, especially American Jews, believe that Israel is desperately working towards a two-state solution which will finally end Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, the reality on the ground is markedly different.

Settlements continue to grow despite the attention they receive in the media. New immigrants from the United States, France and South Africa as well as Israelis from Tel Aviv pour into the steady supply of homes over the 1948 Green Line in search of a modest house with a garden at a reasonable price.

New settlers are only part of the Israeli mosaic in the West Bank. Israel’s economy is deeply entrenched beyond the Green Line. Recently, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Israeli companies could extract natural minerals from the rich land of the West Bank. The main water aquifers which supply thriving Tel Aviv and Haifa are found under the mountain top city settlement of Ariel. The captive economy of Palestine is a central and lucrative focal point for Israeli exports.

Given this entrenchment of infrastructure, the cornerstone of Israeli society, the army, is symbiotically connected to the West Bank. Israel’s famed conscription is maintained at such high levels, in part, to allow for a constant supply of soldiers needed to patrol the dark corners in between the hills of the West Bank.

Israel’s massive military industry, almost unrivalled throughout the world and known to provide the latest “combat tested” equipment, ranging from drones to tear gas canisters, uses the West Bank as a research and design laboratory. Without the West Bank and its hundreds of Palestinian villages, which double as elaborate training grounds, the industry would surely suffer.

The current Israeli parliament, controlled by an aggressive pro-Settler majority which enjoys enormous popularity in Israeli opinion polls, is busy ensuring that criticism of Israel’s slow annexation of the West Bank is quickly silenced. New laws, like the recently passed anti-boycott legislation that makes nonviolent calls for boycotts of Israel by Israeli civilians a civil crime, have completely erased the Green Line. Human rights organisations which attempt to document Israel’s routine violations on the ground are also targeted with harsh funding laws and vile attacks on the evening Israeli news programmes.

When social justice protests erupted in the centre of Tel Aviv’s cafe-lined streets, all discussion of the occupation or even its economic impact was discredited as political. The time to talk about the social rights for Israelis is now, the protesters claimed, and discussion of the occupation is merely exhausted political banter. Despite the desire of some to draw a connection between social justice and an end to the occupation, Tel Aviv residents, by and large, rubber stamped the occupation. Without a doubt, the social justice protesters, ballooning at times to 500,000 people, demonstrated that there is no longer a large segment of Israeli society that is willing to demand an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

How did Israel’s occupation become entrenched beyond repair? When did an equitable two-state solution become irrelevant? These questions are creeping into the American discourse and factual debate concerning their contours has thrown the American Jewish community into a crisis, one which has been suppressed for a long time.

Expanding on his landmark manifesto in the New York Review of Books called, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”, Peter Beinart sets out to address American Jewish silence on Israel in a new book, The Crisis of Zionism. For Beinart, a generation of young American Jews can no longer identify with Israel as an occupying country. Reconciling their upbringing, soaked in victimhood and Holocaust memory, with the colonial actions of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza is near impossible in the age of new media. Without honest engagement, American Jewish support for Israel risks its own liberal values.

Evidently not strong enough for him to emigrate from New York to Jerusalem, Beinart has a deeply emotional relationship with Zionism. His book is a personal chronicle of his development as a Zionist, which began, of all places, in South Africa. He presents raw reflections about his personal process of awareness of Israel’s immoral treatment of Palestinians, but is careful not to denounce them by always providing an Israel caveat.

Beinart’s arguments are not new or even particularly original, let alone based in reporting from Israel. His analysis draws on a variety of books and reports which don’t capture the entire dialogue taking shape in cafes in Tel Aviv, let alone Ramallah, but allow him to present a slightly new analysis of why the two-state solution has failed. Even those he holds responsible for Israel’s present ills – chief among them revisionist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – are the traditional enemies of American Zionists who start to feel uncomfortable when racism towards Palestinians is clearly articulated, as opposed to quietly carried out.

At its core, The Crisis of Zionism is an ode to liberal Zionism – that confusing ideology which rallies behind the idea Israel can exist as a Jewish and Democratic state – a place where liberalism coexists with tribalism.

Yet, Beinart’s liberal Zionism is a paradox. Zionism, as an ideology and practice, privileges one ethnic group over others. Ignoring this and other bothersome aspects of Israel’s liberal democracy, like the absence of a constitution or the existence of discriminatory laws directed at Israel’s Palestinian citizens, Beinart diverts attention to Israel’s occupation as the root of the country’s problems. West Bank settlers and their allies are portrayed as fanatics, blinded by religious zealotry, which have hijacked Israel’s liberal democracy for their own messianic purposes.

Beinart takes the argument to the extreme in The Crisis of Zionism and a subsequent opinion piece in the New York Times, where he argues that there exists a “democratic Israel”, namely the liberal democracy that exists within the 1948 boundaries of the State of Israel and an “undemocratic Israel”, the West Bank, where Israel controls Palestinians without giving them citizenship and deprives them of basic rights. Not only does this absolve Israelis living in Tel Aviv of responsibility for the entrenchment of the occupation, his separation of the West Bank from Israel safeguards the liberal foundations of Zionism.

This is not how the situation looks on the ground. The Israeli government, which is democratically elected, is responsible for all of the actions of the settlers and the creation of the settlements. Israeli settlements are a by-product of Israeli democracy and not a negation of it. Recent poll data demonstrates that a majority of Israelis support the construction of new settlements and the growing power of the right in the Israeli parliament confirms that. The left-leaning, liberal Israeli, which appears like a Herzlian figure for Beinart, most likely has a son patrolling the streets of Hebron or conducting night raids in Ramallah as part of his military service.

These unavoidable realities do not deter Beinart. His solution for the manufactured impasse between undemocratic and democratic Israel is a targeted boycott of Israeli settlements. Not only is this impossible in practice, but it conceals a more sinister objective.

Beinart’s boycott borrows rhetoric and tactics of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in order to marginalise it. The BDS movement, while calling for an end to Israel’s occupation, focuses on dismantling Israel’s system of inequality through global nonviolent pressure. In a strange and perhaps flawed way, the BDS movement is a last ditch Palestinian effort to appeal to the very liberal elements in Israeli society, which Beinart is interested in expanding, by isolating the exclusivity of Zionism.

Perhaps the actual crisis of Zionism is the fact that liberal Zionist writers, who deeply care for Israel, are unable or unwilling to accept that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is increasingly being defined as a battle over rights and equality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians are coalescing around nonviolent boycotts targeting Israel’s system of inequality while Israel is destroying its own democratic foundations in an attempt to protect its ideology of exclusion. Rigorous critique of Zionism, not Israeli settlements, is the first step towards safeguarding Israel as a haven for Jews while preventing the country from sliding deeper into moral bankruptcy.

Published in The National on 20 April 2012

Beating out Dublin and Bilbao, Cape Town has secured the World Design Capital for 2014. While South African design is still struggling to emerge from the days of political isolation which plagued all aspects of society, Cape Town is taking the initiative to rebrand the city as a world design centre with the hopes that South African designers will find a new pride in their ability to address social problems through design innovation. In my latest report for Monocle 24, I speak with some of the leading design voices in Cape Town to find out how the World Design Capital might change South African design. You can listen to the piece here- my segment starts at minute 16:00, but do yourself a favor and listen to the hour hour. Likewise, you can subscribe and listen to the piece via iTunes.