Conversation roundup

Fresh from the meat locker, some gristle for you to chew on:

• I met a Jewish Israeli anarchist living on a kibbutz (collective farm) in the southern Arava desert. I quote (in response to the question, 'should Israel exist as a Jewish state?'): "I don't believe in states or their weapons." Did his Ph.D. at Oxford on anarchist politics and now he teaches environmental justice and ethics at the Arava Institute (where I spent last week in Israel).
  
  For the Bedu to receive social services from the government, they are forced to settle in recognized townships in dangerous proximity to Israel's major environmentally hazardous sites (e.g., Ramat Hovav). Why locate your prison, nuclear power plant, and industrial waste dump near these communities? Several reasons, including: the state's attitude towards Arabs as a "threat to be managed" rather than a partner to cooperate with in promoting ecological and economic sustainability; the Bedu's marginal position in Israeli society, wielding little to no political or economic influence to protest and/or combat corporate or state decisions, demand equal treatment, or hold officials accountable to their actions; and related, as a marginal community (which usually entails a lack of access to social resources including sanitary water, adequate health care, and quality education), the detrimental effects of living near such sites can easily be written off as the Bedouin's "unhealthy lifestyle choices."
  
  If the Bedu do not settle in government-sanctioned villages, they are ineligible to receive state services, including water and sewage, which obviously creates problems for sanitation and education. This allows the government to claim that it's in the Bedouin's best interest to settle so they can receive the state's blessings ('see, their nomadic culture is so backwards out there in the desert, look how unhealthy they are'). Yet the forced settling is a raw deal as well, as it both undermines traditionally-nomadic Bedu culture (who are used to freely roaming throughout Palestine and the Sinai before the advent of nation-states post WWII) and crams them into artificial villages often in dangerously close proximity to ecological and sociological nightmares. In effect, the state can enact policies with racist undertones -- like plopping these sites in the Bedu's forced backyard -- without individual officials necessarily holding bigoted attitudes themselves (though some obviously do), without the risk of any real political consequence, and without having to accept responsibility for the reason the Bedu don't want to live where they're told in the first place.
  
  This same sort of government policy and business practice has also been reported in the West Bank; again, politicians and Israeli businessmen have near complete impunity as Palestinians have no say in the Israeli political process. Try pulling this shit in Tel Aviv and your ass goes straight from the Knesset back to pushing papers in a municipal affairs office.
  
  
• Also at the Arava, I met an Israeli girl from somewhere in the north of the country. Growing up she tried her best to isolate herself from the Israel/Palestine conflict, though her parents are leftist activists. Her upbringing eventually caught up with her when she studied at the Arava, and now she's fiercely anti-occupation. Naturally she wanted to know how and why some American boy from Oklahoma? got interested in the conflict when she herself, an Israeli hippie, sidelined it on into her twenties. Somewhere in there we got on the Christian Zionist thing; I think it had something to do with my bitterness for having never been exposed to such a human rights catastrophe in Christian circles and for the rubber stamp Israel always received from those same entities, reinforcing the 'Arab=Bad, Israel=Good' assumption in Palestine while claiming to champion justice elsewhere around the world. She was fascinated, if not slightly dumbfounded, by the whole thing, and hailing from Tulsa I had stories to tell myself. 'Zionism is messed up,' she said, 'but Christian Zionism...that's crazy, man.'
  
  
• A few nights ago I went to a concert with my friend Rasha at Mukhtaraf Remal, an artists' collective that hosts concerts, symposiums, gallery showings, etc., and also has a nice cafe on the roof. Rasha had to bounce early, so I stayed to finish my coffee and enjoy the weather a bit more, when I heard a modest 'excuse me' from the table of three women next to mine.
  
  'We noticed that you are alone, would you like to join us?'
  
  Did I just get propositioned by three middle-aged Muslim women?
  
  They wanted to chat with an American student, being somewhat of a rare commodity around these parts. Turns out they are all Palestinian, have been best friends since college, chain smoke, and are all divorced.
  
  One of the women, the only one wearing hijab, is from Gaza, the first person I'd met from "hell on earth" (her words, not mine), so obviously we talked about Israel/Palestine and they asked for my opinions and offered me theirs. In particularly, "TuTu" (her nickname) told me that there was no solution; it is too complex, both sides have too much at stake, the Arabs are too weak on their own to muscle the Israelis and the US but the Palestinians have no options but to fight for what rightfully belongs to them. She endorsed a position very similar to the religious perspective outlined by Dr. Weesam in the Badia, that only after the Second Coming and ensuing apocalypse, as told in the Qur'an, would Allah return Palestine to its legitimate owners and expel the Jews. The other two women were a bit less pessimistic and eschatological, one of them (who had lived in the states for some 15-odd years) expressing her desire for the conflict to end no matter how just so Palestinian children could grow up with normal childhoods: reading books, going to parks, playing with real toys.
  
  I met the women on Sunday night, and since then two of them have called me to see if I needed anything, how I was doing in Amman, and if I'd like to join them at Mukhtaraf again this week. Once again, Jordanians are scoring big points for their hospitality.