[quote of the day]

(Derrel Myers, via)

"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead"

- Arundhati Roy

[arrested jewish-american lucas koerner talks to electronic intifada]

Lucas Koerner's (mentioned in previous post) interview with Electronic Intifada was released today.

Read it here

(from the Facebook page, We are all Lucas Koerner)

Here are some highlights:

"I was taken to a police station right afterwards, where I was held for about four hours before I saw a lawyer. I was threatened numerous times with being tased and being put to sleep by various weapons they had."

"What struck me most about my time in prison is that it is a reflection of the rest of Israeli society in that it's completely segregated. I was placed against my will in the Jewish cell. I asked to be put in the Arab cell. The Jewish cell conditions weren't bad at all; it was still jail, but it was bearable. I did see the Arab cell or at least one of the Arab cells and the conditions there were absolutely abominable."

"I received no support from the US consulate. My friends and family had contacted them and, from what I heard, they basically said that this happens a lot and there's nothing [they] can do. They didn't even come to my trials."

"The Israeli judicial system is very strange in that you can't have a lawyer while being questioned. ...there are no laws within Israel that prevent you from being almost indefinitely detained before being charged. I was never formally charged but I was detained for two days."

[the profane in the holy land]

I've spent the last few weeks trying to gain a better understanding of what daily life in Palestine is like. From everything I've read thus far, it seems to me that the Palestinian experience and identity is shaped not only by a shared narrative and intense collective memory, but also by interactions with the 'Other'. In this way, Palestinians define themselves, but Israel, or opposition to Israel, also defines Palestine.

Israel claims a monopoly on legitimacy, politics, resources, morality, and international support. I recently stumbled upon an article with an accompanying video that I'd like to share: http://ht.ly/5eyth ("Israeli police wrestle US citizen to ground, put knee on his neck," from electronicintifada.net).

The video includes 19 year-old Lucas Koerner's explanation for his presence at the rally, and shows footage of at least three Israeli police roughly pushing Koerner to the ground and pinning him down beneath their knees as they handcuff and carry him to their vehicle.

(Lucas Koerner, from electronicintifada's article)

From what I can tell, the young man (American-Jewish) was being a nonviolent presence and standing in solidarity with the Palestinians at an Israeli settler rally on Jerusalem Day earlier this month. He had affixed a Palestinian flag to his kippah and another to his keffiyeh. The video showed the clear transition from surprise to confusion to anger at this seeming clash of symbols. As the young man stated on his blog,

"For them, Judaism and its physical symbol, the kippah, were inseparably bound up with the particular strain of ethno-religious nationalism associated with the state of Israel. It simply never occurred to them that a Jewish person would, in the name of Jewish ethics, stand in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom. I feel that it was precisely this cognitive dissonance on a societal level that formed the motivation for my arrest."

I am interested in identity formation at the societal/communal level and how such an identity can aggravate conflict or set the stage for peace. Koerner mentions the conflation between national and religious symbols in mainstream Israeli identity. Israel is guilty of portraying Palestinians as hopelessly fused with Islam, fundamentalism, and terrorism. And it's not alone.

Not all Jews are Israelis, and not all Israelis are Jewish. Not all Palestinians are Muslim, and not all Muslims are Palestinian. It may sound ridiculous to state such obvious facts, but the way that we characterize, conceptualize, and use our language to frame a situation have great impact on how we perceive the participants, behavior, and possible solutions.

It's not about anti-Semitism. It's not about Arab terrorism. It's not as simple as Israelis versus Palestinians. Those categories are so much bigger and more complex than a single person, a community, a religion, or a state.

Next: Hamas and Fatah meet in Cairo.