By Kathleen Wallace / CounterPunch
“Our separation from each other is an optical illusion”– Albert Einstein
Great philosophical traditions as well as hints from quantum studies seem to reflect the above, that is, we are all part of a great sea of consciousness. We are simply perceiving this whirlwind tour of life as a unique and separate being, but in truth, all we do is connected to the other, who it turns out is not so other at all. This may be a little too woo for most, but the notion holds when brought down to a more familiar level. Few would be able to disagree that the actions of one hold consequences for all, yet we are mired in a society that tries to swim against the tide of this basic truth. Our ruling class subscribes to this rarefied individualism to a degree that threatens the whole in unprecedented ways.
All of our ills in society can be boiled down to the notion that some feel they are above others and have a unique right to resources, whether that notion comes from being part of a certain social class, sex, religion, or race. Those who have moved beyond those limiting expectations are all generally still bound to work ethic beliefs that one has to “earn” a living, so they are doing marginally better, but still afflicted. The fact that no animal on our planet has any such contractual obligations goes unnoticed. People are special, so the thought goes, so we have unique and unpleasant stipulations placed on our short time here.
Part of that need to “earn” a living and the beliefs that stem from it come from the very normal notion that hard work should have a dividend. It’s frustrating for those in life who work hard and often do not see the results they expected, making persons in this situation uniquely vulnerable to the siren call of fascism and any belief system that brands a lazy other group. Hating such a group can feel like a cold drink of water for those wanting to place blame elsewhere for all the pain they carry inside. In a truly healthy society, however, it wouldn’t be a case of one group working hard, another smoking hash and refusing to do dishes any more than a healthy society would have parents who care for their offspring and those who wouldn’t. A healthy society would beget healthy behavior without punishment scenarios to keep all in line. The overall would outweigh any outliers and a common purpose would unite should our mental health societal quotient go up even a little bit. There is just so much sickness and fear guiding behavior now; everyone is scared of being taken advantage of and wanting to grab what they can to feel safe.
Of course, what we need to survive is a worldview shift that we are all in this together. Artificial boundaries and lines drawn on maps have no true core meaning. A paradigm shift seems beyond unlikely given present circumstances, but isn’t our very existence here fairly unlikely? What are the options if we do not move towards a different belief system? Probably flaming death for everyone. If we do try? Well, probably flaming death for everyone, but maybe not…….. and possibly a little more joy during the trip of life even if we do ultimately fail. Perhaps the goal at hand is to try, and that is the meaning of it all: to at least try.
But whether it be the child under rubble in Gaza, the university student with precarious debt concerns weighing out their broader internal thoughts, the man hidden under thick vegetation on North Sentinel Island……we are all connected by the tendrils of our unique ecosystem, our lovely blue planet. One life is not “worth” more than any other. To allow for that precious child’s death is to kill part of yourself and your own humanity. That life spent in the rainforest, the life spent in the cubicle—it’s all about what we do for the others we love and how willing we are to expand that love out exponentially. That is to say we are the macro-entangled particles, one turn of the direction in one will turn it for us all. To find meaning in all of this, to think in ways that at first may be uncomfortable—we have to consider that it is not normal or sane to allow for violence first national policy. That is the bare minimum start to move this human world towards something sane and kind.
But anyway– how did we come to a point where we have leaders who aren’t equipped to even have such conversations, let alone enact and encourage any commonality? We see the basest and most murderous behavior coming from the top and a definite need to continue with propaganda to keep the masses from discovering basic truths (as in we can’t treat others in this manner). In a selfish sense, what we do to those perceived as others will most definitely come back to us. Don’t even think for one minute that what happens in Gaza stays in Gaza (or Las Vegas either for that matter). It will come and find you and this is not some callous way to forward a perverted notion of karma when it does visit, but simply that we have to be aware of the cause and effect of it all. Best we treat others as we want to be treated. I thank the fates that I was not brought up with any religious system more complicated than the Golden Rule. I was able to shake off the cursory attempts at the other nonsense. The statements that it is all too complicated to understand or change generally come out of sophistry gate-keeping types. The Karine Jean-Pierres of the world. The so-called complexity only serves the goals of the oppressors. Whether religious figures, politicians—It’s all out of a self-serving agenda and a need to not see the whole. It can be just that simple…the Golden Rule.
So as we travel this place in shared space-time, let us connect however we can. The small things, as we interact with each other and plant seeds of commonality. I think many would be surprised how these beliefs and actions can take root. A basic foundation of shared humanity is enough to halt almost every ill. We need to advance the notion that the brave stance is this, not the false bravado, the chest-thumping that comes from internal feelings of inadequacy—the feelings that breed violence and compartmentalization. We can be so much more than our own insecurities. We have power, but it’s locked up in belief systems that benefit only a ruling class, and even for them, it’s a pathology of misery. If in the end, it truly turns out to be futile– planting these seeds with perhaps no long-term human survival on the docket…well, it’ll still make the trip around that much better for us all if we begin to erode this fallacious notion of separation. Bitterness and hate takes its toll. We don’t have to be mired in the horror of the world every moment;we have an obligation for joy as well, but we certainly never have to turn off our hearts and agree with the sickness. If we know a party is to end, it doesn’t mean we decide…. hey let’s murder the host of the party, take their stuff and shit on the floor. But right now, that’s kind of how humanity is acting at the party.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Kathleen Wallace
Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.