abu wilyam ~ أبو وليام

The assault on Gaza is continuing into its fourth week, and I am starting to despair here in Damascus.

For a few days now, I’ve urgently felt the need to write about this issue. It’s not that this will necessarily be read by masses and change the course of what’s happening, but the need to express myself, to do something, is strong at a time when I’m feeling such powerlessness – in myself and in the streets around me.

Emotions are running high in Damascus, and I can start with myself. I’ve been glued to the TV whenever I am at home, flipping back and forth between the various news channels. The graphic and gruesome images shown here of the dead, maimed and burned – which largely don’t make it to American news outlets – are stuck in my head all day. It is emotionally exhausting to watch it nonstop – some Arab satellite channels have only Gaza news, 24/7 – but there’s a feeling you can’t turn it off. When BBC or al-Hurra (a channel, by the way, whose American backing is painfully evident in its coverage) put on news about other things, such as life on mars, another bank bailout, or some Virginia congressman, I feel like I’m missing something. As I write, I’ve got Al-Jazeera on mute, looking up from my computer every so often to keep an eye on what’s happening.

Yet the images on TV are only a small part of what is making me despair. There’s also the scope of the tragedy on a basic human level, the fact that it has gone on for so long without anyone being willing or able to stop it, and the active support that my own government – Democrats and Republicans alike – so eagerly offers to justify Israel’s mass killing. This attack and its justification are certainly among the great crimes of our time – when I looked on the New York Times website earlier this week and saw the most recent news about Gaza buried far down on the World News page (it wasn’t on the front page at all), I felt an overwhelming despair.

For anyone who feels that perhaps I’m exaggerating the issue and that perhaps Israel really does have a right to defend itself in this way, please read this article by Glenn Greenwald. In it he very clearly shows how people like Thomas Friedman who justify Israel’s attack are supporters of terrorism, pure and simple, by advocating the deliberate targeting of civilian population to achieve a political goal. The logic of anyone who justifies this attack can only be accepted if one values an Israeli life nearly 100 times more than a Palestinian life – go ahead and check the latest numbers. Put in less gentle terms, justifying this assault is racism. Is that too harsh for me to say? I don’t think so. I’m sure many people must feel bad about what’s happening in Gaza yet are able to excuse it because people on the other side also feel under threat … I beg of us, step back, and ask ourselves what it is that allows us to value one person’s feeling safe as more important than another person’s life. There’s something wrong here.

Here in Damascus, in addition to hearing about the death and the disgraceful international response, the reactions of friends and strangers have affected me intensely. Nearly every conversation and every interaction I have with people here comes back to Gaza, sooner or later. While people have not stopped going about their everyday lives – work, school, exams, shopping – every way you turn there is a reminder of Gaza: posters, near-daily demonstrations, songs about the Arab struggle on the radio, and personal conversations. The most striking thing is the degree to which people, of all different backgrounds and ages, are physically and emotionally shaken by what is going on.

The first conversation that really affected me was with a stranger, a taxi driver while a Syrian friend and I were on a short ride within the city this past Monday. On the radio was a satirical piece mocking the Egyptian government’s cooperation with Israel, which sparked a conversation among us about the aggression. We all spoke about how upsetting it all is, the non-stop onslaught of pictures and trauma. The driver spoke with a raw honesty that touched me deeply, right from the start.

He said that he wasn’t able to sleep the night before. He’d seen the pictures of a little girl whose legs had been severed because of the attack. He has three daughters, he told us, and the sight of the little girl with no legs kept him up all night, put his nerves on edge, and prompted him to take three pills for preventing heart attacks – he showed us the half-empty package. The sight of her, this girl whose childhood has been stolen, made him think of his eldest daughter who is a bride-to-be and was recently fitted for her wedding dress; it made him think of his middle daughter who especially likes to try on new pairs of shoes; it made him think of his youngest daughter, the same age as the one in the picture, who comes to him and says, “let me dance for you, Daddy!”

He was not talking in the way that taxi drivers sometimes do to foreigners, to make a very particular impression on us, and in fact he probably didn’t realize that I was a foreigner at all. He spoke with a despair that sent shivers down my spine. It was as if he was reluctant to say anything at all, but just couldn’t keep it inside, he had to tell somebody of his despair.

Two days later, Wednesday, I was sitting sipping tea in the bedroom of R., one of my rapper friends, in Mukhayam al-Yarmouk. It’s an outlying part of the city that began as a Palestinian refugee camp and still carries the name “camp” and is mostly inhabited by Palestinian refugees – nevertheless, to call it a camp would be a stretch today: it’s built up into apartment buildings like so much of the rest of Damascus, and has the same services and stores as any other part of the city. We were listening to the final mix of a song that they had recorded in solidarity with Gaza on the previous Sunday. It’s called “From the Hearts of Refugees to Gaza,” and can be found on their myspace.

I had been there for the recording session, since the guys had invited me to come along with my video camera so they could use the footage to make a music video. It had turned out to be quite a thrilling evening: we started out in that same bedroom, waiting for all the group members to gather, when we heard shouting and a ruckus from the street below. It was a passing Hamas rally, complete with flags and slogans, condemning the attack and declaring support for the resistance in Gaza. One of the rappers suggested that we go downstairs and film the group joining in the march – it could be appropriate for a video about Gaza. So we did, running to catch up, and then diving into the middle of the crowd to get a couple minutes of jostly footage of them in the midst of it all, before we had to go our separate way to get to the recording studio. Many singers and musicians, both the famous and the not-so-famous (like my friends), have been making songs about Gaza, some of which are now turning up on radio stations that you hear while riding in a servees or taxi.

Wednesday, sitting in the bedroom of R. listening to the song, we were joined by E., another member of the group, an Algerian raised in Syria. He was just stopping by to copy some of their songs onto his flash drive, and he was actually in a rush: he was on his way to take his mother to the hospital. She had been stricken with a nervous condition, just from the constant images and news about Gaza. I didn’t get to learn much more about his mother, but E. himself was clearly not in a good state: His usual joking manner had been replaced by a serious one; a pall was over his tired face. He spoke of the fatigue he felt from watching the news, and expressed his feeling that this was bound to expand into some much wider conflict. He was clearly scared, upset, and unsure about the future.

That is my very clear sense: every indicator, every interaction I have here points to people being deeply emotionally influenced by what is happening, and feeling the need to express that in some way. One interesting example of such an expression is currently on the front window of a branch of “inhouse coffee,” a Syrian coffee shop chain that has done a pretty remarkable job of imitating the look, feel, and taste of Starbucks. They usually plaster their front window with big stylish snowflakes or a phrase such as “it’s a perfect day!”, but now they’ve replaced that with a large spread about Gaza:

Note the colors of the Palestinian flag, the keffiye-pattern background. In the close up below, most of the repeated Arabic words are translated into English except for سلام and حب – “peace” and “love” – I wonder whether that omission was purposeful or not. While the exact message of the spread could be debated, it certainly asserts solidarity with the Palestinian victims and the resistance in Gaza. Let this be a lesson for anyone who ever thought that people’s love of American products and styles could foster love for American foreign policy!

As for debunking another false premise, check out these pictures from a rally I attended yesterday, organized by a communist party. Note the flags: mostly hammer and sickle, but also PFLP, Syrian, and Palestinian flags. You can also barely make out the yellow Hezbollah flag with green writing, and the tip of the Venezuelan flag on the right. The big poster reads: “Resistance is our only choice / dignity of homeland and citizen above every consideration.” Speeches from various leftist parties and groups emphasized that they are standing in solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. With the communists and the leftists cheering on islamist Hamas, it is crystal clear that the idea of reducing support for Hamas by attacking them is an absolute illusion.

Hafiz al-Asad looks down over the crowd

Rally souvenirs: communist bandanna, protest literature and a scrap of a burned Israeli flag

Tuesday evening I was walking to meet a friend when I noticed the front window of a mini-market that was plastered with posters about Gaza. These have been going up in various places around the city, but I never saw them as densely as on this particular store. The posters were similar to ones I’ve seen before: they condemn Mubarak of Egypt for being a traitor, suggest that he’s in love with Tzipi Livni, link Israel and the USA with Naziism, praise Turkey and Venezuela for condemning the attacks sharply, condemn the silence and inactivity of the U.N. and other international bodies, praise the resistance and ask, “Who has the right to defend himself?” – among other things. Note on the bottom right: devious Calvin as an Israeli soldier pisses on the U.N. and shits flame onto Gaza.

But what really caught my attention were the printed sheets of paper that had been put up in a few places on the storefront:

This is a first for me after years in Damascus. “Welcome to Syria” is usually the rule of thumb here, and probably the sentence most-heard among Americans here is some variation of, “We don’t like your government, but we love the American people.” So this is really something new, no more than a few days old, and obviously a result of the latest events. First let me say that this does not make me feel less safe here – I’ve been going about my life as usual, with no noticeable difference in the way people treat me. And let’s not forget, the level of safety of Damascus to begin with is incomprehensibly high from an urban American perspective.

I did not initially have a particularly strong emotional reaction to this. Having seen the elevated levels of emotions, passion and distress all around this city, as well as how America (Bush and congress together) supports Israel every step of the way, I can’t say that I was surprised to see the signs posted there. Nevertheless, the fact that this kind of thing is new is an indication of the intensity of emotion here right now.

Two days later, on Thursday, I was hanging out in the same area with a Syrian friend and I asked her to go into the store and find out from the owner what drove him to put the sign up. I knew that going into the store myself would not be a productive encounter, and I felt no need to prove to this guy that I wasn’t the kind of American he thought I was. This is the account she wrote out of her experience:

My mission of asking him was way easier than I imagined, he already was cutting a cartoon of a compass pointing towards Israel with an American flag on the pointer, and telling the other people in the shop about how mad he is because of the world conspiracy against Gaza, a conspiracy that is woven by the United States and Israel with the help of the Arab leaders!

I told him, “I understand why all those photos and slogans, but why did you write that thing about no Americans are welcomed here? They are not all the same, you know, I have some American friends who are mad for the crimes committed in Gaza.” He said, “Don’t believe it, they are all the same, they are the ones who elected Bush for the second time, and if it is true that they consider the war a bad thing, why did they elected him for the second time? I don’t believe that they love us or respect us. And you don’t believe them, do you know the poetry that says:

اذا رأيت نيوب الليث بارزة فلا تظن ان الليث يبتسم

If you see the fangs of a lion showing, don’t think that the lion is smiling.”

And here he told me a story to show he was right; he said: “I know an American woman who lives here in the same building and she used to be nice, but yesterday when she saw the sign she came into the shop, she showed me her passport and said, “I have an American passport and you are a Syrian dog,” so I asked her to leave. See, you can’t trust those people.

“And don’t think that Obama is better than Bush, they are all the same allies of Israel. Do you know that the rockets fired on Gaza are all American money? Do you know that they will cover all Gaza war expenses? I heard an American actress describing us Arabs as terrorists cause we sacrifice sheep in Eid Al-Adha, and she cares so much about animal rights? What about human rights? More than million died in Iraq and now in 19 days more than 1000 died in Gaza, so why is no one speaking now? At least we sacrifice the sheep to feed the poor, but what about them?? What is it they are killing all those people for? This actress spends on her dogs in a month more than a whole family on Gaza does on food!

“Every day all those kids in Gaza are dying and no one cares,” he said, and here the man was almost crying. “You may not know what I am talking about because you don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, but as I watch those children dying, I think of my kids and I think that this could happen to them too, I think of those parents in Gaza who are watching their children dying every day and can’t do anything about it.” As he continued to be almost in tears he told me, “you are telling me that there is different between the American government and the American people, but I am sick of this, I am sick of being the nice good guy with those people. We are good people and our religion tells us that we should have tolerance to all people, but until when we will continue being good and nice to them while their government is killing our brothers in Palestine and Iraq and they are doing nothing about it. If someone would support me, I wish I could go and blow myself up in the middle of a crowd of them.” He said that even though he didn’t do anything to the American woman who called him a dog and just asked her kindly to leave.

As I paid for the cookies I bought he told me, “I only want to tell you to listen to your heart and be honest. Those people are killing us every day, they want to destroy us with our religion, and if we allow them there will be a day when someone will stop you in the street and force you to take off your hijab right here in Syria.”

Although I of course disagree with him that every single American wants to destroy Arabs and Islam, I can find little to fault in his account. What have we, collectively, done to show that we have anything but hard feelings and violence for this region? And he’s right about many of the foreigners who come here – even those with noble motives. Besides the many students of Arabic here who are preparing to join the CIA or the military, so many “do-gooder” types care more about their own projects and their own future than about the people they’re supposed to be helping. As I go about my life here, I’ll try to keep questioning my own activities and interactions: am I acting as the smiling fangs of the lion?

And a note about the parts of this man’s comments relating to the conspiracy woven by Israel and the US. While I am not one to generally buy into conspiracy theories, the connections here do not need imagination or a pre-established anti-Israel bias: The US, under Bush and for decades previously, always supports Israel in these types of operations, even though usually the entire rest of the world is rightly in opposition. Israel buys most of its planes and weapons from the US, and the US gives more military aid to Israel than to any other country. This week, Al-Jazeera has juxtaposed footage of Fallujah in 2004 with footage of Gaza in 2009 in which you can see the same white phosphorous bombs falling over the cities (and their residents). Most US commentators might mock talk of an “American-Zionist Imperialist Plot” in the region, but where is the other plausible story? The narrative of “Israel as the poor victim democracy besieged on all sides” simply does not match with reality. That reality combined with a widespread feeling of common Arab identity makes this man’s narrative very understandable.

Just one more example. Remember that everything narrated in this post happened within the space of the past 5 days.

On Tuesday I met my good friend A., who is an art student of oil painting at the University who works as a freelance photographer in his spare time. We embraced and caught up on each other’s news since it we hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks. A. is a young guy with a wide smile and an amiable disposition. He lived in southern California for his 9^th grade of high school, but he’s forgotten most of his English and prefers to speak Arabic anyways. He liked the USA when he was there, but living there also let him appreciate the benefits of Syrian society. Our conversation couldn’t stay away from Gaza for long, especially since we happened to walk past the store with posters and the “no American Citizen” signs.

We spoke of the horror of what is happening in Gaza; we spoke of the emotional fatigue and despair felt from the non-stop images. (So many people I know have been feeling just that!) Like me, he’s been glued to the TV, unable to pull himself away although he’s totally overwhelmed from watching. He said that in the past he has felt numb to the usual stream of grim stories and images streaming in over the news from Palestine and Iraq, but that this time it’s truly different. What’s happening in Gaza, seeing the brutality of the slaughter there and the passivity of the world, is touching him in a truly deep way.

A. said that he’s had a new idea recently. Usually – he reported – the Arabs are all talking, thinking, and working on how to improve their image in front of the world and especially the West – how to convince people that we Arabs are not terrorists, that we don’t ride camels or live in tents, that we are welcoming and friendly. This attack on Gaza, however, has made him think the opposite. It’s the West, it’s you (plural) – he said – who now have to work to improve your image in front of us: you have to prove to us that you are not as monstrous and hypocritical as is clearly shown by Gaza. I agreed with him, that we Americans really do have a lot of work to do, in deed and not just in word, if we want to show people in this region that we do not have a natural tendency towards violence and occupation.

My expression of sympathy towards this viewpoint brought us back to discussing the “No American Citizen” sign on the mini-market window. I wondered aloud whether this kind of sentiment might spread here in Damascus, but A. thought it very unlikely. In fact, the topic prompted him to laugh at the absurdity of the possibility that he, A., would stop answering my phone calls and break off being friends with me because of my nationality. It was another one of those things that an outsider might not imagine possible: how a bright, educated young man can be righteously furious about what’s happening, blame the West and tell his American friend that “you need to do something about this” – yet at the same time not relate that to our friendship, as too young guys with common interests in art, music, and journalism.

Now of course A. and the store-keeper are different people with distinct personalities, different ages and backgrounds, and different dispositions – yet the commonality between their reactions to what is happening struck me powerfully: the repercussions that this assault will have among Arabs in the region are deep and will be long-lasting.

“In the end,” he said, “this conflict doesn’t involve me directly, and I haven’t felt particularly strong about it all my life, until now. This, what’s happening in Gaza, is not the kind of thing that can easily be forgotten. The prospect of coexistence with the people who are doing this seems impossible now.”

I don’t know if there’s much more for me to say than that. Despair is easy to come by these days here in Damascus, despite the fact that we are still very safe here.

I’m imagining some who might respond to this and say, “But he didn’t say anything about the bad things Hamas does!” True, but I did not elect leaders who support everything Hamas does with enthusiasm and without the slightest bit of criticism, and nor do my tax dollars pay for Hamas’s rockets. I directly bear a share of the responsibility for the senseless slaughter that Israel continues to carry out in Gaza. They say that Hamas poses an existential threat to Israelis, but that is only in theory. Israel, on the other hand, poses a very real existential threat to Palestinians: In Gaza, Israeli planes and tanks are rapidly causing Palestinians to cease existing. Please, people, please, we need to take action to change the path that we are on. Talk to everyone you know about it, call your representatives, and be outraged.

1/19 Update: I’ve been thinking a lot about this post I’ve written, responses I’ve gotten from people abroad, and further conversations here about Gaza.  An update and further exploration of the issues is in the works, so check back in after a week to find some more writing.  Please leave comments - the button for it should look like something this: تعليق

1/21 Update:

My further thinking about what I’ve written, combined with some responses I’ve received, have made it clear that I need to explain my own position a little better, besides the fact that there is much more to say about all of these and related issues. I will address some of them here, and expand on others of them in other posts.

I’m sorry that I didn’t make it clearer how my own opinions and positions differ from the people who I quoted. My main idea, in fact, which I should have expressed more directly at the end, was that the sadness, bitterness, and antagonism surrounding me is what makes me despair the most, even more than the deaths of so many. That even among the most open-minded and educated of the Syrians I know, there is a sense that “we can’t live with those people” – this is a true cause for despair. In other words, I do not agree with all that I quoted.

I did not comment critically about what people said for two reasons. I wanted to let people speak for themselves as much as I could, and I also wanted to defend them. When confronted with stances antagonistic towards Israel and the US, a common reflexive response is to dismiss the people who express such positions as extremist, brainwashed, and irrationally hateful. I wanted to show that people who hold such stances are not insane, but rather that their sentiments and positions are based in a reality that is very real but that folks in the US (and elsewhere) don’t get to see. I wanted to let USers empathize with people they wouldn’t otherwise empathize with.

Of course, putting a “no Americans” sign on your shop is a pointless act of antagonism that is based on a vast and false generalization – plus, the shopkeeper should have included Europeans if he’s upset with people whose governments support Israel. Yet regardless of how we judge the man for it (one friend called him ignorant and said he made him ashamed to be Syrian) we need to better understand why he feels so angry. And sorry, it’s not because “he hates freedom,” and in fact his reasons, if exaggerated and simplified, are not utterly false. We do, theoretically at least, carry responsibility for our government and its actions – while I very much appreciate Syrians’ distinguishing Bush and me, they often asserting that the government and the people are utterly distinct, which ends up discounting the legitimacy of our democratic system.

As for the conspiracy theory bit, I do not believe that there is in fact a behind the scenes network of interests out to get the Arabs. But even without this, there is still the fact of American and Israeli economic, military, and tactical coordination and their two occupations of the Arab world: Palestine and Iraq. The fact of US military aid and unwavering diplomatic support for Israel is enough to identify connections between the two, especially in their aggression towards Arab populations, without digging deep or surmising.

This is not to say that all problems in the region stem from Zionism and US imperialism, on the contrary. Indeed, these ideas are often used as excuses for all sorts of less-than-ideal realities here. But we should be able to acknowledge the complexity of the situation: multiple parties deserve blame, and I must take responsibility for which I do carry a partial responsibility – this is another reason why I focused on US responsibility.

Despite all our efforts at empathizing and understanding, however, we’re still left with a situation in which there is a good side (our side) and a bad side (their side), hooray for us, down with them. That this dominant narrative on both sides grows in strength every time something like Gaza happens is truly a cause for despair.

Yet I reject the premise that this is an essentially equal conflict, with two hateful groups going at it just because they hate each other, always have, and always will. I think there is and must be a political solution to the situation, which would have to start with acknowledging its inequalities. Among them are the basic inequality of the occupation, the imbalance in valuing of human lives on either side (in my opinion, this is the real crime of Gaza,) and the inequality of narrative. One side’s good-guy/bad-guy narrative is generally accepted by Western politicians and media (we are a democracy fighting for our freedom and peace, they are terrorists fighting for the destruction of others) while the other side’s good-guy/bad-guy narrative (we are fighting for our freedom and self-determination against an enemy who is fighting to unjustly drive us from our land and take it over) is rarely if ever heard, despite the facts of history which offer plenty of legitimacy to it.

While I believe that we will never all agree on an absolute “right” and “wrong,” about this conflict and about everything else, I am confident – most days – that the path away from despair is through acknowledging the multiple narratives. I think that much of the despair here about Gaza was how thoroughly it proved that no one was listening. Living among that narrative, I felt that feeling of the world standing by, and it hurt. That’s why I felt an urge to write, and with emotion.

Other topics this has got me thinking about, which may become future posts:

- The fundamental challenge of writing about this issue: audiences and tone.
- Obama’s speech and how it relates to Gaza and what I wrote.
- Arabic TV news, its biases and surprises.
- Nationalism/tribalism vs. universalism.
- My own Americanness here in Syria.

1/27 Update:

By the end of the Gaza war, the man at the shop with the posters had increased his signs, adding a couple of ones in handwritten Arabic that were very condemning of Americans. My sister pointed out in the comments that the shop was selling a lot of American products. While it would be generous to view this as comparable to the inhouse coffee example, I think it would also be reasonable to call this hypocrisy: he’s willing to reject American citizens but not American products?

At some point between 1/20 and 1/25, the shop with all the posters was completely cleared of posters and signs. The reason? Not clear. There’s a possibility that someone in authority payed a visit and asked the owner to remove them. Other shops in the vicinity, however, still have some of the same posters up, but without the “no americans” signs. The other possibility is that the outrage ended along with the war. I’ve been a little shocked, actually, at how quickly Gaza furor here has subsided, now that people are no longer dying. Of course the situation is not resolved in any significant way, but for many people here, it’s enough to move on with their lives and forget about it mostly. This deserves further comment as well, but not now.