the exile within

I’ve been half-sick for about a week now. My throat is kinda sore, my head is sort of aching, my balance semi-shaken. Because I’m only half-sick and not sick full-on, I still leave the house and do things, only to feel worse upon returning and starting all over again the next day.

“Maybe you should just get well already. Either that or really be sick and get done with it.”  

“I know!” I scream into my mobile, then cough for a bit, “it’s just like everything else in my life right now isn’t it…” 

“Maybe there’s something in your life that you need to decide whether to give yourself over to or just drop completely. Which can be a scary thing.”

People you sleep with but still call “friends” can be annoyingly insightful sometimes. How dare he figure me out like that, then not even invite me over for the kind of indulgence that could easily distract me from trying to find my own answers this cold and dark evening… 

I go home instead to nurse my cough and my ego with some tea and honey. Can’t sleep again. It’s midnight, but it’s only 10pm in England. A window of opportunity. I dial a few digits, and, by some inexplicable technological miracle, a phone rings thousands of miles away, in London. 

“Shahaf! How ARE you?”

One of my favourite people in the world luckily picks up on the on the other side. Between sending her son off to sleep and getting bitten by her very cheeky cat, she has time for a chat with a friend. Remarkably, neither of us mentions the weather even once. I tell her about my music, my Arabic lessons, how it’s all going rather slow. We compare notes on studying Arabic, which she has been doing as a full-time course for a few months now. 

“It’s funny,” I say, “that you are a lot more likely than I am to get to practise your Arabic with native speakers you would just meet on the street or in shops. London is like that.”

“Yes, but then I’m learning the standard Arabic, not colloquial, which means that I end up speaking like a funny person to most people…” 

We talk about recent holidays. Jobs. Plans. Men. My recent and refreshing discovery of the self-pronounced Queer Scene of Tel Aviv. “So I see you’re in not much rush to come back here all of a sudden…”. We laugh. Wholeheartedly. 

Now in more grave tones, our conversation steers to events in Gaza. Events that have no direct bearing on our daily lives in London and Herzliya, but that have everything to do with me as an Israeli and with her as a British Palestinian. Gaza is only 70km away from where I live, but it could may as well be on another planet. Every day, Gaza sees kidnappings, assassinations, houses demolitions, water shortages, gas shortages, blackouts, curfews, missiles, no jobs, no incomes, no trade, no future; while Herzliya wakes up to another sunny, suburban morning. The contrast would be striking if we Israelis saw more of the other side, which we don’t. Things look pretty much alright from the vantage point of Google Earth. But for international travellers, volunteers and peace workers, going from the high-rises of Tel Aviv to the squalor and despair of Gaza is usually one of the most notable and shocking experiences in their visits. 

“It’s really, really bad right now,” my friend laments. “Everybody over here is talking like this. Some people have given up completely on the idea of a Palestinian state. They say that with the Jewish settlements and all the pressure it’s just too late - that Palestinians should lobby for some kind of future  Arab federation to merge with. I think it’s defeatist.”

“Well you know, I’m not a nationalist. I believe in the right of Return, but I don’t care under what system people live as long as their civil rights are respected, as long as they have sovereignty and self-determination.”

“Yes, it just so happens that normally this kind of self-determination is expressed as a nation-state. Even that is taken away.”

“Yes, and you know, eventually what they did, instead of the proposed electricity cuts, what they did apparently was to further reduce the gas supply to the Gaza power station, so now everyone in Gaza are having 8-10 hour blackouts a day.” The Israeli part of me still tries to justify itself occasionally by displaying its political awareness. Like an occupying force does. “And I don’t know, I keep going back to this one thing, to this question - and I don’t think I have enough insight into what’s happening in Palestinian society, both here and in Europe - but I keep thinking - where is the new Palestinian leadership? Who is it going to be? Someone has to keep the hope alive, to nurture some kind of vision.”

“Well, at the moment that is exactly what’s missing.”