In this blog, I plan to post impressions and thoughts from my travels in Israel-Palestine that didn’t quite fit into the book, Our Way to Fight.   A book is a finite thing, a limited number of words stuffed between covers.  This blog is my chance to stretch the covers, to introduce a few more people engaged in the long struggle for justice, freedom and peace in Palestine and Israel.   For example:

Willowy lithe, the young debkeh dancers seem airborne, unbound by gravity.  They kick and stomp, punctuating the music with breathy shouts that echo in the narrow hall, “Hye!”

Assirk Assaghir, the Nablus Circus School, is one of very few sport facilities in Nablus open to both female and male students; in fact the school encourages bi-gendered classes.  Some of the women wear hijab, the traditional head scarf.  The men’s dark hair is trimmed short.  In their late teens to early twenties, both sexes wear jeans.  For their public performance tonight they’ll change into debkeh gear, satin shirts belted at the waist and baggy black pants tucked into boots for the men, light, loose robes over black pants for the women.

Their energy is dazzling.  It’s mid-afternoon, close to 40 C, no air-conditioning, no windows, and they’ve been fasting since sun-rise for the Ramadan holy month, rehearsing since noon.  They sway to the side and then forward in a graceful arc from the waist, to sweep the earth with a reaching hand.  Interpreting a traditional Palestinian tale, at this point they are harvesting wheat.  Their faces shine with sweat.

This is intifada through dance, a movement of resistance.  If, as many Palestinians have come to believe, the ultimate goal of the occupation is to erase Palestine from the map, these young people refuse to be erased.  Their dance is at least as old as their city.

Over thousands of years, occupiers have come and gone, most recently the Ottoman Turks, the British, the Jordanians, and now the Israelis.  All have left their mark, in one way or another.  But the Nablusis remain.

With roots in this land as ancient as the olive tree, the music that drives the debkeh dancers is woven from the mandolin-like oud, the cry of the yarghul, a sort of double clarinet, and the booming goblet-shaped derbakkeh drum.  The intricate stop-start rhythms are rendered visible in the dance.

Even as they defy gravity they also demonstrate sumud, steadfast perseverance or rootedness, a quality some Palestinians consider their deepest and most abiding survival tactic.

It is rooted in a long view of history, a peasant’s view from the ground, and the knowledge that in time all occupiers pass away, but people of the land remain.  Palestinians also know from the bitterest experience that, perhaps for the first time, instead of wanting them available as slaves or cheap labour as previous occupiers did, the present one actually wants them gone, one way or another.  They also know that if they leave, even temporarily, the chances of being allowed to return are close to zero.

A crescendo of leaps, kicks and twirls, and the debkeh concludes.  The troupe’s lead dancer calls a five minute break, tapping her watch.  Dancers mop their glistening faces on towels and sleeves.  No power drinks here – the Ramadan fast excludes both food and water until sundown.

They take their places, and begin again.

I’m Michael Riordon, a Canadian writer and documentary-maker.

My forthcoming book, Our Way to Fight, explores the dangerous lives of non-violent activists working for peace, justice, and human rights on both sides of the wall in Israel-Palestine.

The book will be released in January 2011 by Pluto Press (international) and Between the Lines (Canada), and in May 2011 by Chicago Review Press/Lawrence Hill Books (US).

Writing Our Way to Fight is my way to fight.  So is this blog.  Through it I’ll share experiences, impressions, and thoughts connected to the book, also updates on people and organizations featured in it.  I’ll post as circumstances warrant and allow.

Soon I’ll add links to sites that I find especially valuable.

Comments are welcome from people seeking a just peace in Palestine-Israel.  A few ground-rules, borrowed from more experienced bloggers:  no racist or sexist comments, no profanity or personal attacks, no misrepresentations of who you are, and no trolling.  Other than that, let’s talk.

But first, impressions:

Soldier boy

Ofra suggests a smart café with an outdoor terrace in Kyriat Motzkin.  After a broiling day, the Mediterranean air feels soft and light.  Kyriat is Hebrew for town, though this one has blurred into a string of suburbs on the wide bay curving north from Haifa.

My supper companions are an Israeli friend travelling with me to the Galilee, a former student of hers named Ofra, and Ofra’s son Uri, who at twenty-one has just completed his compulsory three years of military service.  He’s taller than his mother, but somehow less substantial.  In a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops he looks twelve, though big for his age.  She looks to be in her forties, with black hair pulled back, and dark eyes sparking out of a round face.

The menu here is familiar from similar places in North America, the salads, pastas, burgers, even the carrot cake.  The clientele is also familiar – young,  casually stylish, tanned, sunglasses topping artfully chaotic hair.

A security guard hovers near the entrance, with a black and yellow baton.  I assume it’s a weapon, but when he skims it over flower boxes lining the fence, I recognize an electronic frisking device.  He’s looking for bombs.

Ofra wants my friend to help Uri get into Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  My friend protests that she doesn’t have that kind of power, it will all come down to his marks.  Ofra counters, “You have more power than I do.”  Perhaps embarassed by this bargaining over his head, Uri turns his attention to the street.

His father disappeared a few years ago, my friend told me earlier.  Despite Ofra’s hard-earned degree in sociology, she can only find work as a secretary in a local law office, from which she supports the two of them.  With her son, said my friend, Ofra is as fiercely protective as a mother lion.  During the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when Hezbollah rockets hit the Haifa region, people were urged to evacuate, and most did.  Ofra refused.  What if my son came home on leave, she argued, and no one was here to greet him?

While the women chat in Hebrew, Uri and I manage in English.  “Where will you go next?” he asks.

“To the West Bank,” I reply.

He looks surprised, or suspicious.  “Why do you go there?”

“Why not?” I reply carefully, wondering if this could get awkward.

“Things are very bad there,” he says.

“In what way?”  I’m not so much naïve as careful.

He pauses, then shrugs.  “And after that?”

“After Israel I’m going to Turkey, for a holiday.”

Uri brightens.  “Turkey!  I’ve been there, it’s fantastic!  I want to go back.  The bars are great.”

I smile.  “I think that would mean more at your age than it does at mine.”  I’ve heard often here that after their military service, many young Israeli men go to India to find or lose themselves, and for the cheap drugs.  ‘Scratched,’ these young men are called in Israel, damaged.  At least Turkey is closer.

A little silence, we watch the traffic.  A surprising number of bulky SUVs – I had hoped people here would be more sensible.

My friend told me that when the army assigned Uri to an office job, he was embarassed, even ashamed.  The Israeli warrior ethos does not embrace desk jobs.   I ask cautiously if he’s glad to be done with his military service.  He hesitates.  Then he says, his face still turned away, “If they took people at twenty-one instead of eighteen, maybe I wouldn’t have gone.  This is why they take you at eighteen, before you can think about things for yourself.”

Alert to any threat, the mother lion pounces.  “He was actually preparing to re-enlist,” says Ofra.  Uri rolls his eyes, shakes his head, but she will not be silenced.  “I told him if he tried, I would go personally to the military and I would break some furniture, so they would think I was crazy and they would be afraid to accept him in case he was too.”  The image so tickles me I’m tempted to laugh, but no one else shows a trace of smile.

Ofra holds my eyes, doesn’t blink.  “Of course the people who run this country will do what they want, they always do.  But they will not have my son.  They will not.”

Then our salads arrive.