Me and the One State Solution

I used this appearance on Press TV to explain why I think the idea of a "One State Solution" to resolve the Palestinian cause is bunkum. I would be happy to hear/read your thoughts on this one.

Meandering Thoughts from Hamra

The dust kicked up by the crowds of refugees and the buses that brought them in from Nahr el Bared in the North and Ain el Helweh in the South makes an ugly combination with the Mediterranean humidity of Beirut. It is a kind of unwelcome mud-buth, fully clothed. I haven't showered for a day because I've found myself sleeping in places I hadn't expected, and this isn't the greatest sensation on the skin. Around me, young Palestinian men from these camps, improbably dressed in suffocating nylon football tops and tight-fitting black trousers are standing around and waiting for the protest to begin.

A day after trying to tell a crowd in Dubai about the non-joy of science, I have come to a sit-in at Beirut's Martyrs' Square to stand in solidarity with fellow Palestinians whose homes in the Nahr el Bared camp, never very palatial or welcoming in the first place, became collateral damage in the battle between Islamist fighters and the Lebanese government in 2007. Nahr el Bared means “Cold River”, and the posters for today's event have called it “Fi al Bared Beiti”, a witty pun, I think, which translates to “my house is in the cold”, and also “my house is in the Cold River Camp”.

The sloganeering, always emphatic, is also somewhat confused at this demonstration. Are they chanting for a right to return? Are they here because they are Palestinians who were dispossessed from their homes? Or for the right to live in homes other than the temporary dwellings, usually automobile garages and corrogated iron shacks, to which they have been reduced now? Yet everywhere, at every turn, the protestors want to remind you that their destroyed homes in Nahr el Bared were also “temporary”, and have been for something like 3 generations. An unmelodic, slightly frightening and out-dated musical group wearing berets stands to military attention and sings both the Lebanese and Palestinian national anthems. Nobody seems particularly moved, not even the military-clad—and armed—Lebanese soldiers and gendermarie standing around the Square, but it needs to be made clear that this is a protest of Palestinians living inside Lebanon; there are two separate nations working things out here. Not a human rights or civil rights dispute from people who have nowhere else to conceivably call home. Maybe this will be political suicide, but let's face it: There is no space in RamAllah for these people. Israel will not let them return. We can not defeat Israel. They need to live somewhere. Nobody wants to connect dots so obvious they are screaming. Instead, we listen to speeches delivered by the incredibly optimistic Nawal Najdi.

I don't know Nawal but I do know the type—the type of person who shames me for not being more capable and willing to actually fight the good fight. In a sea of veiled, silent and marginalised women from the camps, Nawal has come, head uncovered and with a personality to talk down an army of men, she is the kind of woman who just instinctively knows that somebody needs to do something about Palestine, and she steps up to the plate. It's brave, but I think also depressing. Her voice fights against the heavy air around us, and can be heard in the surrounding shopping centres of the Solidaire, with their Virgin Megastores and Dunkin' Donuts outlets. I begin to wonder if there is any point to this; I spot a young Lebanese woman passing out flyers to passing cars, and I finally have a chance to think “there's a productive idea”; so I borrow flyers from Rana.

The passing cars do their thing. Some are disgusted and frightened to see Palestinian flags in this city which was crucified in the past for its attachment to the cause; others honk their approval. At least one driver tried to run over Rana later on. We are committed. In the ridiculous dust, between the faces of slightly appalled security guards protecting the Beirut's centre-piece Dunkin' Donuts, I have a chat with—no, I am spoken to by—a feeble-minded Lebanese man in a cap. “I live in Nahr el Bared!” he tells me. I'm from Abu Dis. “Ah, you bring the fragrance of Jerusalem on your body”; I can only smell my own sweat. The chap takes me by the arm and tells me to come visit. I say that I might, but know I won't be given a permit to visit. Besides, I am slightly taken aback by this man who smells holiness in my bodily fluids.

There are many like him, Lebanese so poor they have become camp-dwellers. In bed the next morning, I am told how the Lebanese in the surrounding towns have nowhere to shop now—Nahr el Bared gave them a cheap market where the merchants would give them credit facilities. I look at the ceiling and think of the obvious: That the Palestinians are now the Jews to Lebanon's Belarussia, living in Ghettoes and reduced to scratching out a living from the cracks between stones and destroyed tower blocks, with only their wits to plow.

Today the camp-dwellers who came to Beirut continue to live in the legal loopholes of concrete which are still temporary camps. I'd like to think some Beiruti motorists have read some flyers and might now think that the Palestinians from Nahr el Bared might do with roofs over their heads. I have a passport which will let me out of the airport and so I can go away, but maybe a conscience which will rest a little easier because I can say I took some time off from my holidays to go to a protest and make noise. I think of the wretchedness of the Palestinian who told me he can't even get a permit to go back to where his temporary home used to stand. I think of Abu Mazen on the West Bank and Hamas in Damascus agreeing to disagree in Cairo, and hear the whispers suggesting that's the way the US wants it. I think these thoughts and two beautiful Palestinians sitting in front of me talk about their new film project for the camps, and compare their mobile phones in their West Coast US accented English. I also like my mobile phone. I think about where to find the chess sets at Ta-marbouta, and need to make plans to catch a film in the evening. Just like the campers from Nahr el Bared, I have a home in the cold, but unsimilar to them, it is in far-away London.

I really have to think about re-working my Dubai talk.

Waiting for a Visa: Epilogue

This is the epilogue to my Waiting for a Visa Story. You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

Just outside the Turkish Consulate in London, a small and tranquil English garden is orientalised by the Middle Eastern vibrancy of the visitors. Groups of young men with gelled-back hair in black leather jackets and tight-fitting jeans jostle for attention outside their cars, while an audience of women of all ages sit on ornate metal garden chairs, like only the English would ever buy for outdoors use, and spit out the husks of dried seeds and talk on mobile phones. Just beyond the gate that leads to the cul-de-sac where the Consulate lay, the deafeningly quiet pace of Knightsbridge and England kept the contrast sharp.

I wondered then what Ghassan was doing at that moment. If he had been given the chance to be here today, how soon would he have waited to go back to the Middle East? Ten weeks and more, a full seventy-three days, I had waited and planned to get back to London. One week after getting there I was booking flights and getting ready to go back to an imperial capital we had known even before Britain planted its presence on our shores and changed our mental orientations forever.

He might have not been able to file his own papers, but the old boy spoke the truth when he said,

“if your envelope comes back full, it’s because they’ve given you the rejection letters … if you get a thin envelope, they’ve just given you the passport back.”

How strange it felt to get only my passports back; I almost wanted to throw them away, to hand the opportunity to Ghassan and many others like him who deserved the opportunity every bit as much as I did. The mocking grass seemed insignificant and I couldn’t care when the young woman next to me laughed at the way I jumped in the air. Then I could feel the Sun’s glow on my forehead, and the bitterness of a visa odyssey hit me.

While London had been in throes of a blistering dry cold, Amman was drenched in much-awaited torrential, freezing rain. Just a day before I had come to Jordan the first time around, to make my initial application, Tamara had seen me off at Heathrow, and our scarves and jackets could scarcely hold us apart. She had waited for me for two hours on a train platform before I arrived to catch a flight neither one of us wanted me to be on. The summer Sun and Mediterranean air already seemed so very different from the cold breezes of those days; and the only achievement I could show for the time it took the weather to change was a piece of paper giving me the right to work in London, and it came a month late.

Waiting For a Visa--Part II

This is the continuation of the previous post, as the name suggests. Although it's kind of self-contained, you may wish to read the build-up here.

Waiting for a Visa: Part II

“So what are the English like once you have a chance to meet them? Are the people on the street as uncouth as these guys at the Consulate?”

How to explain? Hearing his question, it was impossible not to remember one of the later conversations I had had with Tamara. Beautifully enough, as she always was, she mentioned after a week in a secluded English village in Dorset—the sort of place which otherwise exists only in some vague cultural memory and is, therefore, as English as can be—remarking,

“It's not like they say … the English are really quite nice.”

I remember feeling slightly taken aback; as if I had wished to have been there to help her discover the kindness of English strangers; but it was true. So like a mathematician re-treading older ground, I had his question's answer ready. It made me feel awkward to have to tell this man that the place he had been planning to see was worth the while, for the people if definitely not for the food or the weather. How strange it was to tell him that for the most part, the English didn't care much for ID cards and unscrupulous attention to formality. It would do him no good to know that the villagers in Dorset had no appetite for these spiders' webs of paperwork. I told him regardless.

“It's not as if you see the police everywhere you go there … it's not like here”

We both looked around to make sure of exactly where it was we were. Finding the only place in the neighbourhood that was going to serve us a beer meant sitting on the best outdoor garden furniture of the Venice cafe. The name didn't seem particularly promising; the towns of Greater Syria are littered with cafes and bars and restaurants named for Italian cities. Just on the other side of a relatively small sea, Europe, and then for us London, would begin. Just like the grass earlier, it was as if even the local surroundings told you it was better to go abroad. In Jordan, even the beer they served was Dutch, instead of, as Ghassan and I had wishfully hoped for, brought over from Taybeh near RamAllah. Just in case we had a doubt, Amman was there to remind us that the grass was greener—and more abundant to begin with—to the North and West from here. Except that at the moment we couldn't go.

So we clinked bottles of Dutch beer and shared white cheese and cucumbers, and thought of the banality of it all. Ghassan found it difficult to form a complete sentence without expletives uncalled for on the table, and so I tried to help by asking about where he would be in RamAllah; RamAllah always brought smiles to the faces of those who knew her.

By the sounds of things, Ghassan had spent many an-hour sipping Taybeh beer and chewing on nuts under fig tree-shaded coffee shops in that hilly West Bank town. There he would sit and watch as others played backgammon--”I don't play, my brothers and I just never learned, I just kind of watch people do it...”--and observe as the world continued to braid an ever-tighter knot out of the Palestinians. The crooks amongst us found it easier to rob the innocent this way, and the innocent found that they could console themselves. For most of us, it meant just sitting on the sidelines and enjoying backgammon.

Tamara's father had been sitting there whiling away the tedium of his days by playing cards and backgammon at the same coffee shops as Ghassan would go to watch. With all the guilt of my former life of writing horoscopes, I would carry the gospel to anybody who would listen that coincidences meant nothing, that a lucky rabbit's foot or a fortuitous date of birth was going to help you as much as a penguin was going to be helped by a TV remote control; but then I didn't want to believe this now. I wanted to believe that there was a benevolent hand making me just the right strand in just the right strand of the braid; and I needed to know more about Tamara's father.

In better days I'd seen his face in photos and heard his voice echoing through a mobile phone; I'd heard of how Jamal Najih had overcome the loss of his hearing to as a youth to become a character on the West Bank. He would read the stories from people's lips and would tell jokes to follow up on them. As if proving he had a musicality with its own inaudible rhythm he would even, for the very lucky, write lyrical poems that would appear in Palestine's newspapers. It was good to know Jamal was well and that he was famous that Tamara had inherited. All this I wanted to believe over beer and cheese and cigarettes in Amman.

Ghassan had his own problems to worry and believe about. Through the years of NGO workers and diplomats and visiting scholars, and a now-former lover, he'd come to think that he had a home in England, with RamAllah being choked into a pale reflection of its former self. Now he didn't know if that home was ever going to be real to him.

“RamAllah isn't so bad now that I think about it ...”

“I've actually wanted to move there myself” I told him.

It was true once; whether it was true any more is another matter. Would I actually belong there? At one point I had imagined myself sitting on a table and playing Tarneeb with Tamara's father. At an earlier time, I had dreamed of teaching and working at Bir Zeit, making something of being a physicist in a country filled with scientists and poets and broken dreams. Yet here I now was, within driving distance of a gaze over Jerusalem and I was going, not to cross the Bridge—we all know which one it is when we mention it—but to apply for a work visa to go and live in London, and over the years of being a Kuwait-born Palestinian exile living in London, London became home and the Homeland became a memory to be consumed over the dinner-table. I wasn't rushing to help the homeland; I was rushing towards another self-imposed exile.

“I think you'll get your visa by the way ...” Ghassan offered without encouragement.

“You've been waiting for 3 working days now? Yeah, they would have rejected you on the first day. It takes them time just to print out the stuff; something tells me you're going to get yours tomorrow.”

Here was a man I had met only about 2 hours and several beers ago, and now I was prepared to hang on to his words like they were gold dust. He was speaking with all the authority of a scholar who didn't know how to fill out visa forms, and I needed to believe he was right, and I knew I was going to come back the next day and wait again throughout the same fiasco and ask the same questions at the window and maybe get another response that would allow me to continue hoping.






Epilogue … to be continued.

Waiting For a Visa--Part I

Waiting for a Visa

It comes as something of a shock to one recently arrived from Kuwait to realise just how un-green Amman truly is. To those of us who are regular visitors from the Gulf, the name of Jordan’s capital city brings to mind the aroma of citrus and mulberry trees wafting down on hill-inclined residential boulevards. Coming into the town from the outlying airport, the pine forests are like a diminutive Yosemite, the difference being more donkey-pulled carts bringing the early watermelons to road-side stalls. Then grass changes everything.

While you wait outside the awning-covered entrance to the WorldBridge Visa Center in Amman—British connections notwithstanding, it’s the American spelling which carries the day in today’s Middle East—you come across that rarest of luxuries in the Levant, a grass lawn. Between the awnings and the pavement in the smart Shmeisani neighbourhood, in an area not much more than 10 meters squared, the blades of grass insult your senses, telling you that the cedar trees were a mirage, you have been in a desert all along. In a country where drought is a perennial menace to drinking water in homes, the grass screams to be sent to another, more green, perhaps even more pleasant, little piece of land tucked away in the North Sea and off the coast of Europe. Here, on this patch of grass, eagerly anticipating crowds gather to get news of their visa applications to England, to Britain, the United Kingdom; usually London.

Here, over the English lawn in the desert city of Amman, the wealthy villa-dwellers of Abdoun, collecting visit visas for their annual shopping trips, stand next to Iraqi refugees—Amman being deemed a safer destination than Baghdad to apply for a visa—seeking to join family members in Kensal Green. Here too stand young academics from BirZeit, having crossed the River Jordan, who now wait for their student visas to complete PhDs in archaeology at the University of London. Together with them are Damascene merchants, and a motley crew of young and old, some assuredly wealthy, others self-consciously middle class and still others desperately aspiring to escape some perilous non-existence in Jordan and the surrounding countries.

For those waiting to find out if they have been granted a visa, the doors open at 4:00; we began arriving at 3:00. By 3:30, the first numbers are assigned to the grass-stomping crowd. The signs all over the visa centre let you know that “WorldBridge… a business operation in association with the UK Border Agency… our employees … not involved in the decision-making process …” Maybe it’s the mild sun-induced delirium, or maybe just the pure chaos of humanity, but neither the security guards outside the centre nor the waiting crowds paid any attention to the meaning of this sign; instead, a sort of theatrical exchange played itself out.

“You can’t stand on the grass … do you want to get your number? Want your visa today? Get off that square, that’s being monitored by CCTV!...I don’t care, just shut up!”

After some abuse from the security guards, a chorus of replies comes back from some of the older men gathered outside.

“What good are you anyway? You can’t even tell me if my application has been processed or not! I’ve been coming here every day for 2 weeks and you can’t tell me a thing! Who do you think you are?”

The thought of standing outside, every day for 2 weeks in the dusty and hot Amman summer came over the people waiting outside. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Called in by number, one-by-one, we were searched and passed through the revolving gates, reminders of prison dramas, to the seating area indoors. A security guard, clearly a man whose passion to work in airport customs was thwarted, but never crushed, a long time ago, goes through your pockets with sadistic completeness. Quite why any of this was necessary was beyond me. A television screen elevated in the top corner of the room lets out the BBC World Service. Posters on the walls urge you to visit Edinburgh, and another reminds any curious applicant that lying on your visa application will “bring shame onto you and your family”. The whole place has the sanitised and unwelcoming feel of an airport waiting lounge, before people thought of making those a bit more comfortable. Now again the sadism of the security guards forces its way onto us.

“Sit there … don’t leave that chair empty, sit right next to that man over there if you could …no, no, you can’t take that jumper off… do you have to fill a cup from the water cooler right now?”

The spectacle having been carried out to the guards’ pleasure—they always win in the end—we are left alone to sit and wait for a few moments and, some nervous conversation grows out of nowhere. Ghassan, sitting next to me in remarkably casual polo shirt and jeans, was a new face to me.

Despite his choice of t-shirt, Ghassan, who would normally have been in RamAllah, was clearly not in the best of moods. Over a period of 2 months, he’d been rejected 3 times for a student visa, and didn’t seem too hopeful that his fourth attempt, about which he was enquiring today, would come back positively. Like so many in the Middle East, his attitude was characterised by one of total fatalism: By sheer force of will, he would either get the visa, or would not. How he had expected to get anywhere in the past was slightly mysterious as, he explained, “I didn’t even bother giving them anything other than the application form the first 2 times—how was I supposed to know they really wanted the stuff?”

Ghassan was a good guy, and, given his credentials, a lot more clever than he had given the British Consulate in Amman reason to believe. His thesis at BirZeit had been supervised by a cousin of mine, the sort of relative one likes to boast about, on account of his stature amongst Palestinian historians, but who in reality I met only once, at a stilted gathering. The Palestinian diaspora being what it is, we instantly found our ways from one mutual friend to another. Soon enough, my number was called and I waited to see what the envelope on the other side of the screen might hold for me.

“Ayyad? Serial number? Nope, not here…come back tomorrow”.

So it was. The suspense had been suspended hardly after I knew it had built up to begin with.

Back outside, Amman had cooled down slightly in between the time it took to arrive and wait and the moment it took them to tell me there was nothing to be known. A little meandering stroll, cigarette in hand, usually solves all problems, or so I told myself.

What was one other day when I had been stuck in Kuwait for 2 months waiting to make this application? When exactly did the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months? At what point did it make sense to wait for 2 months for a 24-month visa? Just how much had I lost through all of this? Was it worth it?

It was impossible not to bring these questions to the stress of the affair, and I wondered if it reflected itself on my completed forms. In fact, none of the really important stuff could be put down on the form. I could let them know that I was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism, nor had I committed any acts either in collaboration with the Nazis or the Red Army. I could—and did—undertake legally that none of those awful things were true about me. Yet there was no real place to let them know that I have been known to be the life and soul of many parties in London. That in fact my knowledge of some bits of English history rivalled most of the natives'. That I was the kind of guy who loved London every bit as much as she loved me. There was to be no place to tell them that I'd already suffered enough as a result of the last 2 months; on no question on the form was I asked if I had unduly placed my life in suspended animation as a result of this. There was no room for me to tell them that there had been once, not too long ago, a lovely young woman in London who loved me very much; and that all the waiting and frustration finally doused out a flame which once burnt brightly and warmly. Where was the compensation for this bureaucratic smouldering of human mystery?

Ghassan was probably thinking the same thing. With his palm to his forehead, he looked over the rejection letter and tried to make sense of his prospects. Adding insult to injury, Ghassan was told that he was, presumably, a cheat and a liar, and a negligent one at that: “You have submitted copies of purported bank statements… you did not submit original copies of these statements…” Purported. The cruelty lied in the way that a foreign speaker would not pick up on the hint, would not know how to purport in the first place, but was told all the same that it was not going to be good.

“Well, I really don’t understand, I gave them exactly the papers I got from the Arab Bank in RamAllah … these are the only sort of statements the bank can give me.” Kafka had written Jackals and Arabs about themes not too far away from this piece of land, and now his wit had returned to the region in the shape of a visa rejection letter.

It would be malicious, but nonetheless true, to admit that I took comfort from the fact that I wasn’t the only person to suffer with bureaucracy. It was reassuring that this was nothing personal; at least, there were other perfectly decent young Palestinian men who were slapped around in exactly the same way. I instinctively offered Ghassan a cigarette; even life in London, and longing to live in London anew, the habit of gifting cigarettes, in the sure knowledge that they will be appreciated, is only good manners in the Arab Middle East. So we smoked and talked.

Just as had happened with me, Ghassan’s last romance had fizzled in the midst of a bureaucratic to-and-fro. Standing between him and English pastures, between pints of warm beer at the pub with classmates who would quickly become friends, overturning the stereotypes most had of the English; all of these culture shocks would remain unreal by Ghassan. The exasperation was enough to bring out raw honesty; maybe everybody in Jordan smoked, and shared cigarettes, but sharing a drink was a sign of intimacy reserved for those who were truly special.

So time it was to find a beer.

Is there any hope to be found here?

For some inexplicable reason, I am drawn to repeatedly watch the point-blank range shooting of Ashraf Abu Rahme, an unarmed protester objecting to the construction of the wall on his village's lands. While I want to take solace from the fact that this episode was captured through the efforts of an Israeli human rights organisations, I am also reminded by the dozens of very similar videos which were broadcast from the West Bank and Gaza during the 1987-1992 intifada. While the 87 intifada did lead to a new political reality--albeit an imperfect one--for the Palestinians, it is not widely thought that the infractions against Palestinian human rights, and the attention this garnered on the world stage, had much to do with it.

Nevertheless, there is this sense of indestructibility of the Palestinian resistance which I get from watching the video. As in the same videos from 2 decades ago, a lone Palestinian man was taken away from a group surrounding him in order for him to be brutalised in front of the others; to emasculate, humiliate and dehumanise the victim, and to make a show of tearing apart the Palestinians as a people...and yet, yet, we survive, not just as individuals, but as a group.

Living in the Future: Why London Will be Like the Gulf Very Soon

Last week I played host, albeit for only an hour or so, to two visitors from London coming to Kuwait City. The differences between these two conurbations are clear enough for anybody to see, and feel, at a glance; but I want to use this slot to put out a warning to people living in my newfound hometown on the Thames, and tell them how they're quickly catching up with the energy-consuming, waistline-expanding, concrete building-dwelling denizens of the Gulf.

Wimbledon Village, despite its growing population of moneyed Arabs, is probably one of the last parts of London one would expect to resemble Kuwait or the Gulf in general. But an idyllic stroll around the very English common on a Sunday is a good place to witness the worrying convergence between the Gulf and the south of England. It's not uncommon, in 2008, to watch as English couples leave their children of imported maids and nannies from East Asia, typically, as is the case in the Gulf, from the Phillipines. The fact that these families, who demonstrably have ample time which they could spend their children are hiring foreign help will not be without its consequences. As at least one Kuwaiti sociologist points out, leaving your children with a underpaid foreign help is bad enough for the underpaid foreign help--but it also means, as the nannies concerned are likely to only speak pidgin English, that the children are growing up with a sever linguistic and social handicap. With their first experiences of many Asian nationalities coming through the person of domestic help, children in this part of the world quickly pick up a form of racism which is obstinate in its presence. The rapid economic rise in places like India has been greeted with something approaching disbelief here--if they were doing so well, how is it they have to send legions of labourers here?

Like the Gulf, and completely unlike India, the UK is also going about it non-industrially; there is almost a religious belief in the media and "creative" industries being able to drive the economy as a whole. If thousands of Islington-dwelling arty farty film types can make enough money to buy DVD players for £15, then why worry about trying to put people in back-breaking jobs where they physically have to make the machines? This ability to live off the cream of the land without having to do any of the milking has earned the Gulf states the admiration of even former heads of the WTO . Surprisingly, nobody has considered the fact that having absolutely no manufacturing base whatsoever has meant that both the UK and the GCC have uncontrollable inflation problems--if all the goods available in a given market are produced and priced abroad, simply twiddling interest rates at Central Bank level will do no good for anybody. The ultimate result of all this is in fact making itself in the increasingly similar ways in which the UK and the Gulf are treating their workers: Witness suggestions that new immigrants to Britain should expect fewer economic advantages, later, a result of growing unease at the sheer numbers of foreigners contributing to the British economy. Like the Gulf states before, one of the first casualties will be syndicated labour within the British economy.

So I'm going to end this long-overdue blog post like so many others in the past, with little glue to hold the bits together, and just a nod to some things which have been bothering me.