Lords of the Land

Note: I'm on vacation in the U.S. for the month of December, so I'm not actually in the Middle East for the next few posts. But, I'm taking advantage of the fast Internet speeds to post some articles I've been meaning to do for a while. Oh, glorious high-speed Internet! It just took me 30 seconds to upload a picture that would usually take me upwards of an hour.

Lords of the Land is very literally heavy reading. The book is encyclopedia length and I blame carrying around the hard-back version for all the painful knots in my shoulders. Although it's a commitment, if you want to understand the issue of the settlements in Israel and the West Bank, this is the definitive book to read. It's meticulously researched and beautifully written, with lines like "Almost out of sight and out of mind, it [the settlement project] is going on with the full cooperation of the state of Israel and its institutions, as though it were an involuntary, unconsidered movement of a body that had lost its mind." The authors, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, a historian and a journalist, sometimes veer toward the over dramatic. But, their subject matter is so shocking that, most of the time, it seemed in context to me. Overall, they chronicle the story of how almost 300,000 settlers came to live in the West Bank and Gaza and the many people that made this massive project possible, and as the Economist wrote, "Lords of the Land lets no-one off the hook."

Pause in the Sinai

I was invited to go with friends to the Sinai this week. We stayed with Bedouin in the desert, drank tea, rode camels, and drank more tea. It was not a tourist experience. The friends who invited me are German anthropologists who've been living on and off with this tribe for years. It was not exactly a comfortable experience. My Arabic is terrible, and I don't speak German. So I spent a lot of time sitting quietly, and drank a lot of tea. A lot. Plus, half our group got violently ill. Which was made more difficult by the fact that there were no toilets or toilet paper. But, despite all this, when we returned home, we realized we had collected all these vivid and funny stories and sat around the table shaking with laughter over them. Like the camel that managed to run after a female camel from another caravan despite the fact that his legs were tied together. Or one of the young boys in the Bedouin tribe who was given a mattress for Eid (the rest of the tribe sleeps on the ground) and showed it off joyfully to anyone who came to visit. And it was revolutionary to live a deep and simple life even just for a few days.