Freedom Theater director Udi Aloni with actors during rehearsal of 'While Waiting' (Michael Nagle/NYT)
All you Jews (and Palestinians and anyone else) at the Occupy Wall Street protests are hereby urged to take a break tomorrow night. That’s because you have a rare opportunity to see Palestine’s Freedom Theater perform their adaptation of Waiting for Godot, which they call While Waiting (it appears they had to change the name of the play to satisfy objections by the Beckett estate to casting women in the leading and supporting roles) at Columbia University’s Miller Theater. In the event the performance is sold out, there will also be an October 30th performance at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in a benefit for the Theater. Tony Kushner will host the event and David Byrne and other New York cultural/musical luminaries will appear.
The founder of the ensemble, Juliano Mer Khamis, was murdered outside the Theater in Jenin about six months ago in a crime that has never been solved either by Palestinian or Israeli authorities. Instead of investigating, the Israelis arrested the actor playing Pozzo in the performance and held him for a month before releasing him with no charges. They also attacked the Theater and arrested two of the key staff. This was all in some way understood, only by the IDF mind you, as an effort to solve the murder. But certainly not an attempt to harass the company. Certainly not.
You see, official Israel is deeply threatened by Israelis who act in solidarity with Palestinians. The fact that Mer-Khamis was the child of a Jewish-Palestinian marriage must also have enraged official Israel in the same way miscegenation drove Southern white supremacists around the bend in the 1960s.
The actor and director certainly enraged the radical element within the Palestinian community as well by criticizing the narrowness of gender roles in its society. Hamas and the Islamists were none too happy with him. But that only makes Juliano Mer-Khamis a more compelling figure.
Today is Yom Kippur, a day of contemplation and personal accounting. A sacred day on the Jewish calendar. Today is the day you consider what you’ve done as a person and what Jews have done as a people during the past year. And you resolve to do better.
I, like all of us, have things both of which I am proud and things I regret. As Jews, we also have done things of which we should be proud and of which we should not. As a Jew, I cannot be proud of an Israel that occupies another people and disenfranchises 20% of its own Israeli-Palestinian citizens.
These are the Days of Awe. The days of teshuvah (“returning” or “repentance”). Our tradition says if we repent sincerely for our sins we may be forgiven. But to repent we must understand what we have done. Most Jews do not. Or if they understand, they understand to a degree, but not fully. That is one of the goals of this blog. To lay the predicament out for as many of my fellow Jews as I can.
Tonight, partly in a spirit of teshuvah, partly in a spirit of tribute to a great Israeli poet who is gone, I offer this tribute to Taha Muhammad Ali.
In a similar spirit, I offer this poem from the collection, Jerusalem 1967, by the great Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai. It is a poem that is wise about Jewish history and wise about Israel’s relation to the Diaspora. A poem written just after the 1967 War that begins to grapple with what the Palestinian means to Israel. But an imperfect poem, because most Israelis at that time did not understand what Occupation would mean. But it is still a poem that is struggling with the issue, and for that reason it is worthy of consideration on this Yom Kippur.
For many years, I was a graduate student in Hebrew literature and studied at several of this country’s best programs as well as the Hebrew University. But I never came face to face with Palestinian literature. And some of Israel’s finest writers are Palestinians writing in both Arabic and Hebrew.
Israel, of course does not generally honor its Palestinian writers with the high accolades it offers its Jewish ones. By my rough count, there have been three Israel Prizes for such figures in the sixty plus years of the state and only one for a writer. And none for Mahmoud Darwish or even a contemporary writer in Hebrew like Sayed Kashua (at least not yet). Israelis seem allergic to the idea that a great national poet might write in another language than Hebrew. The very notion offends the classical Zionist upbringing of most Israelis.
That’s why I’m especially grateful that when Ori Nir sent me notice a few days ago of Ali’s death he didn’t write, as many Israelis would, “one of Israel’s greatest Arab poets.” He wrote “one of Israel’s greatest poets.” It’s terribly important not to make such distinctions.
So I’d like to rectify the inadequacy of my earlier education by memorializing one of Israel’s greatest poets, Taha Muhammad Ali, who passed away this week at the age of 80. Since many of my readers, especially those who are not Arabic-fluent, may not be familiar with Ali, I quote this short biographical passage.
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in a village in Galilee, Saffuriya, in Mandatory Palestine. At seventeen, he fled to Lebanon with his family after the village came under heavy bombardment during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later he slipped back across the border with his family and settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since.
In the fifties and sixties, he sold souvenirs during the day and studied poetry (everything from classical Arabic to contemporary American free-verse) at night. Still owner of a small souvenir/antiques shop he operates with his sons, he writes vividly of his childhood in Saffuriya and of the political upheavals he has survived.
The Saffuriya of his youth has served as the nexus of his poetry and fiction, which are grounded in everyday experience and driven by a storyteller’s vivid imagination. He is self-taught and began his poetry career late.
Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humor and an unflinching, at times painfully honest approach; his poetry’s apparent simplicity and homespun truths conceal the subtle grafting of classical Arabic onto colloquial forms of expression. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences have been powerfully moved his poems of political complexity and humanity. He has published several collections of poetry and is also a short story writer.
Ali’s Israeli-American biographer, Adina Hoffman, traveled to the poet’s ancestral village, Saffuriya (or Tzipori in Hebrew and Sephoris in Latin), which at one time was a large, agricultural town of 4,500 residents. It is now a ruin in the midst of a Jewish National Fund pine forest, replete with a plaque honoring Guatemalan national independence day! It is thus one of hundreds of such Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed in 1948.
It is only natural to compare Ali to that other, perhaps grander voice of Palestinian poetry, Mahmoud Darwish. But they are quite different. Where Darwish wrote in classical Arabic, Ali, having only four years formal schooling, writes in the everyday Arabic of the street. Where Darwish’s poems are both deeply personal and political engaged, Ali’s creep up on politics from different angles while always maintaining a primary commitment to the personal. He has the chutzpah (or perhaps naivete) to say:
There is no Israel. There is no Palestine.
For Darwish, this would be heresy, though I’m sure he would understand the impulse.
I’m including this extraordinary poem which proceeds in Ali’s inimitable sly style from a crying out for revenge to a quiet internal triumph over such human frailty. By poem’s end, the narrator, merely by ignoring the tormentor, has achieved all the revenge he needs:
REVENGE
translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin
At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
*
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
*
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
*
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
Nazareth
April 15, 2006
And another wonderful shorter poem, Twigs:
And, so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.
WHYY featured an interview with Ali’s biographer, Adina Hoffman, who wrote My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.
A few days ago, the Nobel committee awarded the literature prize to a Swedish poet, which isn’t surprising considering that the awards are largely based in Sweden. What a pity they didn’t go farther afield to find this gem of a poet who was under their noses for decades just waiting to be discovered–until it was too late. If Israel would embrace its poets equally regardless of their ethnicity or native language, then its Palestinian writers would be able to claim their place on the world stage as they should. That they have not yet done so is yet another of the tragedies of unfulfilled promise that is contemporary Israel.
For the poetry junkies out there and those thoroughly captivated by the man, here’s more video of him reading his poetry:
The Olive Tree of Jerusalem (Armenian Ceramics, East Jerusalem)
Tonight, I’m repaying a debt that is long overdue. A few years ago when I was installing the slideshow you see in my banner above, I discovered a beautiful mural on a website called Tikkun Tree. There they displayed a work of art which I discovered had been created in a style called Balian Armenian ceramics created solely by the company, Armenian Ceramics, East Jerusalem. Anyone haunting the Old City shuk will know Armenian ceramics, as they’re all over the place. But the only ones that are original works of art are those produced in the studios of Armenian Ceramics. The work was featured in an exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC in 1992. The owner, Neshan Balian, graciously granted me permission to use the Jerusalem Olive Tree mural image in my slideshow, which is the first image you see when you open a page at my website.
I feature the image here for your enjoyment. The company’s website is full of gorgeous works of art suitable for all manner of residential installations as you can see by visiting the site. Please use my name and mention Tikun Olam if you do contact them.
Thanks to reader Maria for admiring their work and reminding me of my obligation.
Israel’s foremost novelist, David Grossman, has just published a new novel in English, To the End of the Land (original Hebrew title, Isha Borachat Mi’Bsora, A Woman Flees [Bad] Tidings). While I have not yet read it, I’ve just read a remarkable, glowing review by Jacqueline Rose in The Guardian which has made me put aside my quarrels with Grossman’s liberal Zionist views to embrace the book.
It is interesting that Grossman and his translator have discarded the original Hebrew title in favor of a much more allegorical one in English. ”To the End of the Land,” as a title does convey the heroine’s trek across the land of Israel. It also conveys the notion that “the land” is a concept which we must somehow “get to the end of” if we are ever to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That we must somehow liquidate the notion that land (whether viewed by Palestinian or Israeli nationalists) is sacred or more important than people and peace. I know I’m not quite saying this right and will be jumped on by my Palestinian/Arab friends. For this I apologize.
But I also rather like the simplicity and descriptiveness of the Hebrew original.
Many will know that while writing the book, Grossman’s beloved son, Uri, was killed on the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war. In a monumental feat of pure guts, Grossman addressed a rally commemorating the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and subsumed his grief into a savage and profound assault on the then prime mininster, Ehud Olmert and his chief of staff, Dan Halutz. While this speech did not seal Olmert’s political fate (Israel is too polarized for such a possibility), it permanently tarnished him in the eyes of many Israelis. When he fell from power over a tawdry corruption scandal, many of the novelist’s criticisms of the politician were borne out.
David Grossman and son, Uri (John MacDougall/AFP/Getty)
Here are some excerpts from Rose’s review:
For some time now, David Grossman has been describing his writing as a means of survival, as a way of no longer feeling a victim in the “disaster zone” of the seemingly eternal conflict that is Israel-Palestine…With the publication of this extraordinary, impassioned novel, such purpose or hope acquires a new meaning and intensity.
…To the End of the Land tells the story of Ora, who leaves her home in Jerusalem to walk across Israel to Galilee, in order to avoid the “notifiers” who might arrive at any moment to inform her of the death of her son. It is the trip they had planned together to celebrate his discharge from military service. Instead, he volunteers to rejoin the army in a high-intensity offensive – “a kick-ass operation” – against the Palestinians at the start of the second intifada…
Grossman has not ventured into this territory in his fiction for a long time – not since his earliest novel, The Smile of the Lamb, which was the first Israeli novel to be written about the occupation…Ora believes that Israel has no future: “It doesn’t really have a chance, this country. It just doesn’t.” Although Ora will never leave Israel, she is running away…
Ora is, as she puts it, the first “notification-refusenik”. Ofer will not die as long as she keeps talking and writing about his life (she keeps notebooks as she goes). “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Avram whispers to her near the end of the novel, “I will fear no evil, for my story is with me.” She also believes, in what she herself recognises as “flipped-out” magical thinking, that if she is not there to receive the notification, then it will be impossible for her son to have died…Before anything else, To the End of the Land is a novel that recounts like no other I have read the lengths to which a mother will go to preserve the life of her child.
…This is a novel that forces us to ask more than ever: who are the Arabs for Israel’s Jews?…in one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, Sami…drives her through a checkpoint with a sick Palestinian child in her lap to a makeshift hospital where she, and we as readers, are witness to the precariousness of life under occupation (a child on the other side against whom all the odds are stacked but who deserves no less to survive).
…It has become part of the legend of this novel that, while he was writing it, Grossman’s son Uri was killed on the last day of the 2006 Israeli offensive in Lebanon. It will never be read now without that knowledge, without that unspeakable pain, which is in danger of conferring on the book a mythical status. To the End of the Land is without question one of the most powerful and moving novels I have read. But we do the novel, and Grossman, no favours if we turn it into a sacred object, beyond critical scrutiny and outside the reach of the history to which it so complexly and sometimes disturbingly relates.
Signatories of Hollywood-Broadway statement supporting Israeli artists
Last week, the newly inaugurated, multi-million dollar West Bank cultural center in Ariel announced that all Israel’s major drama companies would perform there in its new theater, marking the first time they ever crossed the Green Line for such performances. The news raised a stir since Israel’s theater community is generally known for espousing liberal-left political views. An even deeper irony is that one of the plays to be presented was Bertold Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
This news struck like a lightning bolt through Israel’s artistic community and within days over 50 Israeli actors, directors and producers had signed a letter saying they would refuse to perform in Ariel until there was an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. The Israeli right protested that its settlements were an integral part of Eretz Yisrael and demanding that the government force the artists to perform or risk losing their government subsidies. The signers have been roundly praised and booed on the Israeli stage.
Chaim Levinson, who broke the original Ariel theater story in Haaretz, has just published the first official and complete story. Now it can be told.
Jewish Voice for Peace has organized what may be the first statement by Hollywood and Broadeway artists supporting an Israeli cultural boycott. 150 actors, playwrights, directors & producers signed a petition supporting Israel’s theater community, which announced that it would refuse to perform in Ariel.
Among the celebrities are Stephen Sondheim, Mandy Patinkin, Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City), James Schamus (Ang Lee’s producer), Emily Mann (McCarter Theater), Eve Ensler (Vagina Monologues), Julianne Moore, Lynn Notage (Ruined), Bill Irwin, Kathleen Chalfant, Mira Nair, Oskar Eustis (Public Theater), Hal Prince (Broadway producer), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Sheldon Harnick (Broadway lyricist), Ed Asner (Up), Theodore Bikel, Wallace Shawn, Miriam Margolyes, Ruth Reichl, and Vanessa Redgrave.
Their statement reads:
On August 27th, dozens of Israeli actors, directors, and playwrights made the brave decision not to perform in Ariel, one of the largest of the West Bank settlements, which by all standards of international law are clearly illegal. As American actors, directors, critics and playwrights, we salute our Israeli counterparts for their courageous decision.
Most of us are involved in daily compromises with wrongful acts. When a group of people suddenly have the clarity of mind to see that the next compromise looming up before them is an unbearable one — and when they somehow find the strength to refuse to cross that line – we can’t help but be overjoyed and inspired and grateful.
It’s thrilling to think that these Israeli theatre artists have refused to allow their work to be used to normalize a cruel occupation which they know to be wrong…and which is impeding the hope for a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike. They’ve made a wonderful decision, and they deserve the respect of people everywhere who dream of justice. We stand with them.
Wallace Shawn had a typically incisive comment in an interview for Haaretz:
Wallace Shawn told Haaretz on Sunday that the Israeli artists’ refusal had touched him. They did something that could get them fired, and he found that inspiring, he said. Theater is the art of truth, and the Israeli artists are following their own truth, he said.
I support both the Israeli and American artists who are in solidarity with the peace movement and those opposed to the Occupation. I also have to say this is one of the most legitimate uses of the cultural boycott I’ve yet seen.
I wanted to return to Eichner’s story in Yediot, because it has a typically nasty underbelly worth noting. Since Eichner wrote the smear of Breaking the Silence with the benefit of a source within the same consulate, it seems clear the same thing happened in this case. Either through pro-Israel celebrities who dutifully reported in to the consulate, or through intelligence sources it has in the industry (you bet there are), the former discovered the JVP campaign.
Here are excerpts from the story:
Art in Service [to politics]
Yediot is reporting that leftist American Jewish groups have begun a petition by actors and celebrities in Hollywood and on Broadway in which they express their support for the Israeli actors…Jewish Voice for Peace turned to a group of actors and leaders in the film industry, seeking their support for a statement to be published in Israel and America.
…Several noted Hollywood actors turned to Israel consul general in Los Angeles, Yeki Dayan, seeking his counsel about whether to sign the statement. ”Instead of getting involved in such matters it would be more helpful to support Israeli culture which needs such help. They shouldn’t involve themselves in domestic Israeli politics. What’s more, Ariel is within the Israeli consensus.”
In light of the campaign, the consultate turned to key members of the Hollywood entertainment industry asking them to persuade others not to sign.
It’s interesting to know that the consul general breaks out the same tired old finger-wagging cliches in lecturing American artists about what their “proper” role should be in supporting Israel. In other words, do what we tell you to do not what your conscience tells you to do because we know better than your conscience what is best for you and Israel.
The contention that Ariel is “within the Israeli consensus” is also highly debatable. What Dayan means to say is that Ariel is talked about by many, especially on the right, as a community that Israel will retain in any peace agreement. Therefore, he argues that it WILL BE within Israel so it shouldn’t be a controversial issue. But the plain fact is that Ariel is a settlement, one of the largest in the West Bank. It is illegal under international law. Settlements whether in Ariel or elsewhere run contrary to U.S. policy which disdains them. Further, there IS no peace agreement and until there is there is no consensus in Israel or elsewhere that Ariel is as much a part of Israel as Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel is sponsoring a poster competition to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions. The winner of the contest will be announced on December 10th, International Human Rights Day. The graphic art is extraordinary and confronts Israel’s human rights situation head on.
ACRI joined together with the City of Holon to exhibit some of the posters outdoors and it stirred great controversy among those who believe that discussing these issues can only damage Israel. The right-wing group, If You Will It, complained to the Israeli government and asked it to investigate whether the city exhibit was mounted with state funds. It also demanded the firing of any employees who helped organize the exhibition.
This is the typical extreme nationalist backlash against anything that smacks of leftist “defeatism.” Among the interesting reasons for fearing the exhibit’s message:
There is no need to point out that the purpose of this exhibit is to continue the demonization of the IDF…through its representation as cruel and immoral in order to lay the groundwork for those elements in Israel and abroad pursuing Israeli officers for the purpose of bringing them to justice [for war crimes].
Several posters stand out for varying reasons. One titled, You Don’t See It with Your Own Eyes? (the English translation on the poster isn’t precise) comments on the Gaza war and Occupation in general. Graphically, it mimics a vision chart with numbers displaying on each line along with text, as each line gets progressively smaller. The top line displays the number of agreements Israel has signed; next the number of Gaza war dead; next the number of civilian dead; then the length of the wall; number of checkpoints; number of years the Geneva Conventions have existed; the number of Conventions; and finally the number of peoples (2); and conflicts (1).
Another displays three “windows” through which you see an idyllic rural image with the caption, “there are those who gaze out on pastoral landscape;” and an urban image, “others view urban landscape;” and finally a solid graffiti-strewn image of the Separate Wall, “and those who see nothing.”
This too is a testament to power of art to “see” the social landscape in the way that the average Israeli almost never does. And that is why the Israeli right seeks to demonize this exhibit. It is dangerous to the equilibrium of the Israeli public. The current government needs to maintain an image of an Israel that is secure, safe, and stable. That image is what allows Israel to continue to defy international law and bodies, and the power of the U.S., EU and other governments insisting that it return to 1967 boundaries and recognize a Palestinian state. Anything that threatens this slumber into which Israelis have slipped is a danger.
H/t to Didi Remez for bringing this story to my attention and helping me find the poster images.
This post will attest to the benefit of bloggers checking their referral log to see who is reading and linking to them. Had I not done this I wouldn’t have come across one of the most interesting web sites I’d seen in months. It is Jewdas: Radical Voices for the Alternative Diaspora. The website name conceals multiple meanings: first, there is the reference to Judas, by which the site mocks the notion that radical Jews are somehow betraying their faith and also attacking the prevailing Christian culture; second, the ‘das’ in the title refers to the Hebrew word for “religion” and when yoked to the notion of Judas as Jesus’ enemy, also conveys an a certain animus toward the religious aspect of Jewish identity.
This just one helluva funny website and I hope a few quotations will illuminate some of the wit that is there. Here’s the About page (warning: there is a bit of inside Brit Yid references and humor):
Probably you’ve clicked here because you’re rather baffled by the rest of the site. Probably this is because you’re not Jewish. Or American. Or (g-d forbid) both!
…A few years ago we came across a great find. Amidst a large pile of rubble, in a dark corner of East London, we found the book of Jewdas. And lo, it was very good.
It had been written in Jerusalem thousands of years ago, by a cabal of radical scribes, and yet we discovered it by the back of a kebab shop in Dalston.
Written in Yiddish (which turned out to be a far older, more authentic language than Hebrew), it teaches of the great radicalism of Jewish tradition, a tradition of dreamers, subversives, cosmopolitans and counter-culturalists. It waxes lyrical on the virtues of cosmopolitanism, putting loyalty to ideas of international justice over tribalism and parochialism, and attacks the oppressiveness of the ‘natural’ in favour of ethics designed to meet the face of the other. It preaches of the need to widen Judaism beyond the boundaries of those born Jewish, towards an ethic of wider concern, a Judaism that might at times stand in critique of the Jews. It prophesied a rise of ‘international subversives’ who would undermine power wherever they found themselves, who would preach veganism, pacifism and pickled cucumbers.
The book also made very clear that man would rise up, known as Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and that he would not be the messiah, but rather a very naughty boy.
The book was not only passive, it also made active demands. A quick bible code style analysis determined that the book was instructing us to mercilessly satirize Anglo Jewry, suggest new and more radical ways of being Jewish, and also throw excellent parties. Who were we to disobey?
So here we are. Hope that made some sense. If not lets just say this- whatever your background if you: prefer stirring things up to keeping the peace, prefer dreaming of the utopian rather than settling for the prosaic, and think that culture and ethnicity should be springboards for overthrowing the state, then you’re a Jewdaser at heart. Lets storm the barricades together.
There is much at this site which reminds me of my own days as a radical Jewish college student in the 1970s: the heroes are almost identical (they’ve added Naomi Klein as a latter-day saint); there is merciless satirizing of the tradition; the courage in the face of a massive, alienating Jewish communal consensus. This is a perfect example of plus ca change, plus la meme chose (or whatever is the Yiddish equivalent).
Jewdas brings to mind the wonderful blurb Donald Barthelme wrote for his friend, Grace Paley’s astonishing Enormous Changes at the Last Minute:
Grace Paley is a wonderful writer and troublemaker. We are fortunate to have her in our country.
That is the spirit of Jewdas and mirrors perfectly my embrace of their contrarian Jewish ethos. What can I say? I love Jews like these.
Laila Abu-Saba 'zichrona l'vracha' ("may her memory be for a blessing")
Laila Abu-Saba was a great soul. If she had been Jewish (she was married to a Jew) she would have been a tzadeket. But she was a Lebanese American Christian. That doesn’t make her any less of a saint for sure.
Like me, Laila blogged about the Israel-Arab conflict, she at Dove’s Eye View. And like me, she blogged about much more than that: about Lebanese cuisine, writing, her poet father. Unlike me, she had breast cancer. And it killed her. But the cancer didn’t kill her really. Nothing could kill her spirit, a spirit that yearned for all that was good and decent and kind.
I got the distinct impression that Laila didn’t want to be defined by her cancer. She wanted to write her blog about the things in life that gave her joy and not be burdened by things that did not.
I don’t remember how exactly I came to meet her. But when I first began blogging in 2003 I searched high and low for anyone blogging on a subject remotely close to my own. Back then, I had an immense need for solidarity and community. That’s how I found Laila. It was so refreshing. Here was an Arab-American with roots in the Middle East who was free of partisanship, rigid ideology. She was just a human being. She didn’t denounce Jews or Israelis though she did stand up for justice. She didn’t embrace any hard political position. She just wanted peace.
As you know, I sometimes have a politically confrontational style. That was the only thing that divided us after she became ill. I would send her a link to some particular outrage I’d written about and she’d reply in her loving way: please, I need to stay positive. I don’t want to hear about the bad things. Tell me about the good. It meant that we corresponded a bit less. And that is the reason I didn’t know that she passed away on October 8th. When I learned of her death a few minutes ago I felt like I’d lost something precious. And this is a person I never even met in person. So don’t let anyone tell you that online relationships are any less powerful that face-to-face ones.
At one point, Laila and I were planning to get together on my next trip to the Bay Area. I so looked forward to meeting this powerful, pure voice for good. That won’t happen now. But that just means that I will have to internalize a part of Laila and her loving spirit inside myself. It will be hard because she was so good and so pure. But I will try.
Here is a passage Laila wrote on returning a year ago from a trip home to Lebanon. It will quicken your pulse:
“So please, friend, bless what you have and let go of fear for the future. Today is the only day you have got. You are breathing. Enjoy your breath. You are alive. Enjoy your life. You have a daughter and parents. Love them. Bless everybody who comes across your path. And the work? Whatever. Bless your work, too. Bless your town, your bills, your possessions. You are lucky to be here for all of it. If some of it gets taken away, well fine, something else will take its place. You are an amazing confluence of billions of variables and nobody else is having your life right this minute.
Enjoy! And don’t worry about hope. Just breathe and appreciate your breath. Everything arises from that.”
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This post will attest to the benefit of bloggers checking their referral log to see who is reading and linking to them. Had I not done this I wouldn’t have come across one of the most interesting web sites I’d seen in months. It is 
