Love Palestine

October 2004. I’m starting to figure out why Palestine grabs me and won’t let me go. Nature is generous, content, unsuspecting. Yielding and conciliatory, disorganized but fairly stable. If something new manages to take hold, it’s given the benefit of the doubt. Nature spreads a wide blanket and then culls itself until there’s about enough to go around. It seeks overall balance and stability. As a child of this system, I crave it.

It’s strong enough to withstand anything but the profit motive. The profit motive unbalances. It hoards and concentrates, it asks for guarantees in a world of chaos. Anything that yields is destroyed by it. Anything that fights it and doesn’t become it is destroyed by it. I’m not asking for feudalism or to become hunter-gatherers, but just the mindset that we’re all human, the world is generous, we’ll all die some day so we might as well enjoy the time and the abundance we have, that the very last thing we should do in a cruel and beautiful world is to accentuate and dwell on and worry about and increase the cruelty, create our own human-born cruelty and try to dominate each other, fight each other for control when control is a great illusion.

When I sit in a coffee house with Westerners, there’s always an undercurrent of worry, of self-consciousness, of judgment. When I sit with Palestinians, every little funny thing we or anyone else does, it’s just that—funny. Delightful. Just people. Masha’Allah. No judgment unless actual harm is intended. And why would harm be intended? People who intend harm are considered surprising and kind of pitiful. Crazy a little bit, and sad. Something to avoid, something dangerous and incomprehensible and not worth our good time. Not something to fight—something to walk away from, like a sick person who’s contagious and refuses to seek treatment or even cover their mouth when they cough. Like some poor kid with a flame thrower attached to his arm that burns himself and anyone who comes near, and who can see a reason to walk up to them and risk being burned? It’s sad that they have isolated themselves, but life is too short to walk into sickness and fire and get nothing but sick and burned. And of course whenever they get well and cool down, they are welcome back.

This mentality, to me, is so relaxing. It fits. It feels like home. I feel at ease, I feel warm and perfect and unworried. The point is not that we’re perfect; the point is, we don’t stress about being perfect. We’re doing our best. We’re here. We’re fine. It’s quite enough. So it’s perfect.

Oh, but the profit motive comes, the drive for control and domination, and we can’t walk away when there’s a bulldozer on our lawn and a boot on our neck and a bullet in a child’s brain. If we do nothing we lose. If we fight fire with fire we lose spectacularly and become what we hate in the process. How in the end can we fight without fighting when they are treating us so violently and brutally? How can everything strong and yielding just get mown down with steel blades? How did this happen? Am I just a reactionary? But to what end all this brutally precise machinery? What the hell are we doing?

The ones who seek domination at the expense of all else live in perpetual fear and eventually fall. The ones who yield and smile and trust, they would last longer, endure and be stronger and happier and live more genuinely, but the cowboys have to come and take it all in a swipe. Take a strong, graceful citadel and cram it into an ugly, ill-fated house of cards. For what? Even the vaunted middle classes are popping pills. We can do better.