My newest beta reader is a COINTELPRO prisoner

UPDATE: We learned on the morning of June 25, 2014 that Jalil was turned down for parole yet again. He wrote to me and my husband that there had been one sympathetic person on the parole board, but she must have failed to convince one of the other two people. I feel so sad, because I know from letters he wrote to me and my husband that he had allowed himself to hope.

In previous blog posts I wrote about a visit to Attica prison and my conversation with Jalil Muntaqim, a member of the Black Panther Party who was swept up in the COINTELPRO prosecutions/persecutions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1970s and has been incarcerated since 1973.

During our visit in April, we were talking about our writing and my husband brought up, a little to my chagrin, my novel, The Price We Paid, and suggested that Jalil’s opinion on it was worth having.

Now, the thing is, my main character, Islam Goldberg-Jones is a political prisoner incarcerated for three decades for a crime he did not commit. Even though the fascist Christian Republic government has fallen by the end of the novel, he remains in jail because the federal judiciary remains filled with Christian Republic appointees. I actually had in mind COINTELPRO prisoner Leonard Peltier when I subjected Iz to life in prison. (I had this fantasy that if the novel were published I would follow up with a novella or short story that frees Iz on the condition that Obama pardon Peltier—but it looks unlikely at this point that the book will be published while Obama is still in office.)

So, I never thought I’d have the chance to have an actual COINTELPRO prisoner read the novel and offer suggestions—and he was someone I did not know well to boot, always a bonus in a beta reader. (People most willing to read your manuscripts are usually people who like you, and they will try to be objective, but they will also always cut you a little slack.)

Within a few days of his receiving my manuscript, I had Jalil’s first letter. It was exactly the sort of critique that any writer hopes to receive from a reader, one that shows the reader has read the manuscript carefully, noticed gaps in logic, and sees ways that it can be improved. He followed it with two more letters containing some afterthoughts—again, gratifying to the writer, because it shows the novel has stuck with the reader.

The flaw he pointed out that I most want to remedy was the omission of how the African slave trade, 400 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow etc would have fed into the rise of the Christian Republic theocracy—even though the people participating in the government, including people of color, might not understand this history.

Additionally, he wrote

As you may recall, I mentioned there was an absence of the African diaspora experience and how it shaped the U.S. existence. What I failed to mention as a method for you to include this dynamic is the reality of how the slave trade miscegenation created a New Afrikan. The Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Mandigo, Mandika, etc. etc. were chained, shackled and brought to the country, denied the right to practice their indigenous religions (Yoruba, Islam, Animism, etc.) were told to Christianize their names, not permitted to read or write, until they were integrated into the Christian religion, soon being allowed to read the Bible and Christian literature, etc. until they were able to have Black Christian churches and other forms of worship. This method of creating a New Afrikan, including Native American and European DNA in the Afrikan bloodline, wrapped in the Christian belief system was an important plan/procedure to domicile these Africans, which lead to the U.S. becoming an international economic power.

So this has given me the idea to go back to the Ralph section, when he is meeting the young people from all the various youth groups in the DC area to plan public witnesses that are veiled critiques of the government, and having one of them be a New Afrikan youth group, who view Christianity as a slave religion. I was thinking that Jerry, Ralph’s boyfriend, could become fascinated by the New Afrikan kids and interested in that history. Hank, on the other hand, devout African Methodist Episcopal Zion member that he is, would frown on this talk, and that could increase the sense of alienation that Ralph begins to feel towards Hank, who has been a mentor and father figure to him.

Last summer, I wrote about the pleasure of revising future Canadian history in the manuscript after my colleague Jim Loney read it. I will feel some of the same pleasure incorporating Jalil’s suggestions, especially since Iz and most of the people in my novel’s resistance movement are people of color.

So I was even more apologetic than I would have been ordinarily that it took me so long to respond to Jalil’s letters. I noted that I was feeling a little overwhelmed by my CPT work, and had been unable to do writing that really fed me for more than a month (more about this in a future post.) He wrote back that it was good to take time away from CPT work to deal with my needs and mentioned that his comrade in the struggle, Safiya Bukhari had died too young because she had not taken care of herself. (It feels weird to receive comfort and encouragement from someone who is locked up in Attica while I am living a suburban lifestyle in Rochester, NY.) I googled Bukhari and really wish she was still around. She sounds awesome. And she was a year older than I am when she died.

In a couple weeks, Jalil will be face a parole hearing for the eighth time. It is my great hope that justice will prevail and he will be able to leave prison and sit down to the family dinner his mother wants so much. If not, I am going to adjust my fantasy. If I manage to sell this book I will suggest, as part of the marketing, that I will follow up with a short story or novella about Iz leaving jail, on the condition that all of the COINTELPRO prisoners receive a pardon.

Dreams are free, right?

The BDS Debate In Our House

This post first appeared on The Jewish Pluralist website.
My husband and I met because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A progressive Israeli-American, he came to hear me give a presentation called “Eye-witness to the Intifada” in November 2001 and asked good questions. A few months later, we met at another Middle East peace event, talked for hours afterwards and have been together ever since.

While some may view us as an odd couple—a secular Israeli Jew and a religious Mennonite who works with a human rights organization in Palestine—we agree on the most fundamental issues at work in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We believe that Palestinians and Israelis are entitled to the same human rights; no exceptions. We agree that the Israeli military occupation must end. We agree that Israeli leaders, supported by the U.S. Congress, have been most responsible for scuttling effective peace negotiations, but that most official Palestinian leaders have not done well by their people either.

Our arguments over points of disagreement never reach satisfactory conclusions, I think, because we are arguing from two different platforms. Israel was Michael’s home for fifteen years and he would still live there if family circumstances had not compelled him to return to the U.S. I, on the other hand, in addition to working in Palestine have worked with my human rights organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), in Haiti, Chiapas, Mexico, Colombia, and with Indigenous communities in North America. So I view the situation in Palestine through the lens of a human rights observer, rather than as from the perspective of someone with ties to a homeland.

This reality colors our disagreement over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. Although even in that area, we probably agree more than we disagree. Michael always boycotted items produced in settlements, and as someone who does socially responsible financial planning for a living, he would boycott the corporations that reinforce and profit from the military aspects of the Israeli occupation—e.g., Motorola, Raytheon, and Caterpillar—anyway. But when it comes to boycotting products made inside Israel proper, or boycotting Israeli cultural and academic enterprises, Michael is passionately opposed.

I do not match his passion in my disagreement. Those of us who work on the CPT’s Palestine team could not ourselves agree on an ardent support of the full spectrum of the BDS movement when we tried to write our own statement on the topic. But when Palestinian Christian partner organizations launched the Kairos document in 2009, asking the international community to support them by adopting BDS principles, we felt we had to stand with them. For decades, the international community has lectured Palestinians on using nonviolent resistance against the occupation. BDS is nonviolent resistance, and, as the document says, Palestinian Christians are not viewing it as an act of revenge, “but rather a serious action in order to reach a just and definitive peace.” Those are principles very much in keeping with the philosophy of CPT.

I have heard all the arguments against BDS. Why is Israel being singled out when human rights abuses are so much worse in [insert country]? Answer: Idi Amin’s regime killed exponentially more people in Uganda during the 1970s than the South African government killed in four decades of apartheid. Does that mean the international community should not have been in solidarity with South African anti-Apartheid activists?

BDS will only make Israelis more recalcitrant. Answer: How could Israel be more recalcitrant than it is now? The same argument was used for South Africa, and for a time the South African government did push back, but ultimately, practical people like DeKlerk recognized that Apartheid could not go on forever.

The academic cultural boycott alienates the very Israelis who are most supportive of ending the occupation. Answer: A. there is a distinction between boycotts of artists and academics who are officially representing the state of Israel, and academics and artists who happen to be Israeli. B. Presenting an attractive, cultured face helps mitigate the barbarity of the occupation. It was, in fact the boycott by sports teams and entertainers, that swung white public opinion against apartheid in South Africa more than the economic boycott.

Israel is nothing like South Africa. Answer: Every South African Israeli I know, every South African I have met who has come through Hebron has told me the checkpoints and treatment of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers eerily evoke to them the worst of Apartheid’s heyday.(1)

I can keep generating responses like these. I have used them in many conversations with Israeli and Jewish friends, and I see that I cause them pain when I do so, which I hate. But I have seen Palestinian friends brutalized by soldiers and settlers. I have seen them lose their land and their homes. I have seen Palestinians shot, spit on, and in general, treated worse than animals by the hideous tentacles of the Israeli military occupation. And since I began working in Hebron in 1995, the situation has only gotten worse; no amount of dialogue, solidarity outreach, or top level diplomacy has stopped the erosion of civil rights and human dignity for the people in the Hebron district and the rest of Palestine.

So ultimately, the decision for my colleagues and me to support the BDS movement is this: Palestinians have asked us to participate with them in this nonviolent struggle of last resort. Their lives and livelihoods are not worth more than Israeli or Jewish lives. But they ARE worth more than Israeli and Jewish feelings, even the feelings of those Israelis and Jews I love the most.

(1). Michael and I watched a PBS special on the 25th Anniversary of Paul Simon’s Graceland album. During its production, Simon went to South Africa at the time of the Cultural Boycott and used prominent black South African musicians in the recording of his album, which caused a huge debate. Some, including founder of Artists Against Apartheid, Dali Tambo, argued he should be boycotted, while others argued he was providing employment for and celebrating black musicians. The special included a segment with Simon and Tambo cordially discussing the boycott. Dali Tambo still believed Simon should have been boycotted, but they hugged at the end of the conversation. My takeaway? We won’t know ultimately about the effectiveness of BDS in Israel and Palestine until we have some hindsight. Michael’s takeaway? Boycotting Simon was a ridiculous idea then, and it’s still a ridiculous idea.

Pope Francis in Palestine and Israel

My piece that appeared on The Jewish Pluralist website this past week:

May 26, 2014

Pope Francis in Palestine and Israel
Kathleen Kern

“I have a huge crush on the Pope,” I announced to my coworkers in our Hebron apartment* over supper last fall. “I suppose that’s weird, being Mennonite and all, but…”

“No,” my teammate said, “I’m Muslim and I have a crush on the Pope.”

Even my Jewish husband—who was at first skeptical of Pope Francis because of his silence as Archbishop in Argentina during the 1970s-80s when the U.S.-backed junta was torturing and murdering thousands of Argentineans—has admitted he has been a drastic improvement over recent occupants of the Papal See.

For me, the priority Francis places on caring for the marginalized, and the way he seems to have marginalized more popular obsessions of the Catholic church hierarchy tell me that he is serious about following Jesus, and encouraging the wider church to do so. And let’s face it, the guy is a champion when it comes to symbolism: washing the feet of Muslim women prisoners, confiscating the mansion of a rich bishop and turning it into a soup kitchen, choosing not to live himself in the luxurious Papal palace, but in small monastery apartment.

So I expected a certain amount of symbolism when he arrived in Israel/Palestine this past weekend. And sure enough, that moment happened at the wall that surrounds Bethlehem and which has strangled its economy: the Apartheid/Separation/Security Wall/Fence/Barrier.

Pictures of him laying his hand on the wall and pressing his forehead against it were probably meant to evoke the reverence with which people make contact with the Kotel on the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif. Someone on my Twitter feed crowed, “This picture is worth a thousand Kerry visits.” But in a picture of the Pope laying his head against the wall I see something else. I see a certain slump in his shoulders. I see depression. I see futility—a “God, you must do something, I can do nothing” attitude.

Perhaps I am projecting. You see, I am married to someone who strongly believes in the two state solution as do his J-Street colleagues, whom I like and admire. And the human rights milieu in which I work contains strong proponents for the one-state solution, whom I like and admire. And I, who have worked in Hebron since 1995 and seen the settler population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank grow from 150,000 to 500, 000 believe this:

Neither solution, as I have studied them, can possibly work, not with the craven Israeli and Palestinian political leadership in power now. Not with Israel holding all the cards and continually confiscating land in the West Bank and building settlements while it claims to want negotiations. Not with the U.S. Congress prepared to give Israel all the aid it wants, no questions asked. I do not see what new or creative ideas Shimon Peres or Mahmoud Abbas, whom the Pope invited to the Vatican while he was in the region, could possibly have to offer to the peace process.

If some solution does come, it will not come from Popes or Presidents, but from people that nobody is watching right now. People who see a chink in the wall of the Occupation that is not widely visible now and a way to bring at least a small part of it down. They in turn will inspire others to bring another part of it down and so on and so on, and finally the politicians will move in, legislate the end and take credit for it.

But I have a feeling that Pope Francis, if no one has assassinated him by then, will know who’s responsible and will give credit where it’s due. (Okay, yeah, I have this worldview thing…)

*I work for a Human Rights organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams. We have projects in Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Palestine and with Indigenous Nations in North America.

Why aren’t the COINTELPRO prisoners free already? My visit with Jalil Muntaqim in Attica

Attica prisoner from COINTELPRO era to face eighth parole hearing in June

The release of Betty Medsger’s book The Burglary this winter once again drew attention to the conspiracies of COINTELPRO, a program devised by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that sought to discredit and destabilize minority empowerment and self-defense groups like the NAACP, Black Panthers and American Indian Movement— sometimes to the point of assassinating members of their leadership.
The false evidence and prosecutorial misconduct used to convict high profile COINTELPRO prisoners such as Leonard Peltier is a matter of public record. But J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI also framed dozens of lesser known individuals such as Attica inmate Jalil Muntaqim (formerly Anthony Bottom) who, like Peltier, are still in jail decades after the Church Committee held hearings in 1975 exposing this misconduct.

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Muntaqim on April 9, 2014 at Attica State Prison. The problem with the Church Committee hearings, he told me, was that they never proposed a remedy for the activists imprisoned by the unethical conduct of the law enforcement officers during the COINTELPRO years.

Among the irregularities in his own prosecution for the murder of two police officers in 1971 included a colleague tortured with a cattle prod and needles in his testicles to get him to testify against Muntaqim and Herman Bell both of whom were convicted of the killings. When he told the judge he was testifying only because of torture, the judge informed the prosecutor that the witness had revealed this information to him, but did not share the information with the defense. Muntaqim also knows that tapes exist of Hoover, Nixon, H.R. Haldemann, John Ehrlichman, and Mark Felt (of Watergate’s Deep Throat fame) deciding to solve the shootings of the police officers (under the code name NewKill) by setting up Muntaqim and his codefendants, but his lawyer has not been granted access to those tapes. During his trial, ballistics expert George Simmons matched a gun that Muntaqim had carried in California to the bullet that killed the police officers and testified that he was the only person who had examined this ballistics evidence. Years later, Muntaqim’s defense team found out that an FBI ballistics expert had examined the gun and the bullet and determined they were not a match. This information was also withheld from the defense. In the 1980s, three months after Muntaqim’s lawyer filed a petition for a new trial based on this new evidence, someone removed the gun and the ballistics report from the locker in New York where they had been stored.

The parole board, largely made up of ex-law enforcement personnel, has denied Jalil Muntaqim parole seven times. The first six times, they did so because he did not express remorse (this stipulation is a glitch in the system for all who take plea bargains to avoid the hazards or costs of a trial or prisoners who are wrongly convicted: they must express remorse for crimes they did not commit.) For the seventh time, because his eighty-year-old mother wants so much for the whole family to sit down for a meal together before she dies, he decided to say, “Okay, I did it,” and express remorse. The parole board then denied him parole because he had lied about committing the crime the previous six times.

Jalil Muntaqim has another parole hearing coming up in June. He has 750 letters testifying to his good character and his rehabilitation. Included among those is a letter from the family of one of the slain police officers who wrote of Muntaqim and Herman Bell, “If they did it, we forgive them. But we have serious concerns about whether they are the ones.” Muntaqim will argue the precedent set by Silman v. Travis that if remorse and rehabilitation are the only relevant factors for a parole board to make decision regarding his release, the members of the board cannot make up reasons to keep him in jail.

Aside from wanting to grant his mother’s wish, he also thinks he could do more on the outside to keep young people out of jail. “I’m wasted here,” he told me. “I feel like I’m that Dutch boy with all ten fingers and toes in the dike.”

From a justice perspective, however, Mr. Muntaqim’s plans for the future are beside the point. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was a stain on our constitution and disreputable era in our law enforcement history. The people it sent to prison should be set free.

Kathleen Kern, from Rochester, NY has worked for the human rights organization Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993, serving on assignments—and advocating for political prisoners—in Haiti, Israel, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the U.S. and Canada.

Visit to Attica Prison aka “Correctional Facility”

My husband and I are perhaps the only couple I know who would work a trip to Attica Correctional Facility into a romantic weekend getaway. But we did. I’ll be writing more about our visit with Jalil Muntaqim this week. Jalil—like Leonard Peltier, Martin Luther King, and members of other minority empowerment and antiwar groups—was the target of J. Edgar Hoover’s vivious COINTELPRO campaign, which came to light in the 1970s.

But I thought for now I’d just jot down a few impressions of our visit to Attica, which looks something like a castle with its turrets, parapets and ramparts. Michael and I got there around 10:30, bringing with us our drivers licenses and the car key—the only items visitors are allowed to take inside the prison. We filled out information slips with rubbery pens about 3” long (made so they could not be weaponized, I guess—but when we got inside with the actual prisoners they laid out pencils for us to use, so I could have gotten all stabby with those menacing lead points, if I had wanted to.)

We sat in the outside waiting room with families who were talking with each other in subdued conversations. A nurse who had sat apart and said she usually keeps to herself told us the guards were behaving disrespectfully that day, by making the people wait outside while they appeared to be doing nothing. I came to understand once we were inside, while watching the other people as we sat talking with Jalil, how precious that time was to them, and that this time was dispensed entirely at the discretion of the guards.

This is the outfit I was wearing when I was deemed too alluring for Attica.

When the guards called Jalil’s name (actually, the name before he became a Muslim, “Anthony Bottom,”), Michael and I came forward to be processed. A female guard informed me that my shirt was too revealing, and I would have to go to a dollar store and buy something else. I said I could zip up the vest I was wearing, but she told me I could not be trusted to do that while I was in the visiting room. Fortunately, since we had planned to go to a bed and breakfast afterwards, Michael had an extra shirt in his car.

I took the car keys, turned to the others in the waiting room and said, “Guess I’m too slutty for Attica” and walked out. Later, one young woman who had burst out laughing when I said this, was told her fashionably ripped jeans and striped sweater were too tight—even though other women had been allowed in wearing identical clothing. I wondered if it was because she laughed. I also wondered what sort of business the dollar store did selling clothes to people who arrived wearing the wrong ones, and what people did who came to see family members on the bus, who didn’t have a car to make the quick three mile trip to the dollar store to appease the arbiters of suitable prison visitor attire.

By the time we actually got to the visiting room, and Jalil was released to come meet with us, it was 12:30—two hours after we had arrived. At one point Michael went to the vending machines to buy some lunch and Jalil asked me what I saw when I looked around at the other tables. I told him I was surprised by how much love I saw, by how many people were smiling. “I mean,” I said, “I’m sure there’s also a lot of family dysfunction, here, too.” He laughed. “You think?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “but they’re still here. They want to be together. Some of these people have been physically holding on to each other for hours.”

“Yeah,” he said. “These families have sacrificed a lot to be here.”

Murdered and Missing Women: Reflections on a Tumblr comment

[Warning: This release contains profanity and triggers about violence.]

The way these phrases and photos invade my life is a bit like grace, in that I do not anticipate their effect and I know they are spiritually important—but they do not feel like grace. They are always something dreadful and sad that spring out of the information gathering I do that is part of my work. Usually, they are not accounts of slaughters or grand tragedies, or pictures of carnage. When an Israeli military bulldozer driver ran over Rachel Corrie in March 2003 (can it really be eleven years now?) The photo of her corpse did not pierce me. It was the photo of her colleagues—calmly comforting her in previous photos—weeping and embracing each other in the final photo, after her death, that got its hooks into me, that still has its hooks in me for that matter.

Most recently, the item of hideous grace was this: “Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love.”

It was a comment by a young women going by the name “Willow Deplorable” on the Tumblr blog of our Aboriginal Justice Team. They had posted a notice about 26-year-old Loretta Saunders’ body turning up on the Trans-Canada highway in New Brunswick. An activist trying to publicize Canadian authorities’ lack of interest in more than 800 murdered and missing Indigenous women, Saunders had been writing her thesis on the topic when she disappeared on February 13. I clicked on a link that brought me to the article about her disappearance, and for some reason, among the 64 notes posted at the bottom of the article, Willow Deplorable’s jumped out at me:

“Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love.”

And then I read a piece by Saunders’ thesis advisor, Darryl Leroux, who wrote that the image of her final resting place by the highway “hurts beyond anything I could say in words…I simply cannot get this image out of my mind.” I read Tara Williamson’s piece, “Don’t be tricked,” in which she said she shared Leroux’s initial gut reaction, “she’ll show up in a ditch like so many indigenous women before her” but allowed herself “this glimmer of hope, this notion that, for some reason, maybe this time it would be different…because she was an urbanized grad student or because she could pass as white … Despite all my talk, all my activism, all my ‘decolonizing’ work, I swallowed the pill… I got tricked.”

Williamson goes on to say,

•   If you are an Indigenous woman, don’t be tricked into thinking you are any more safe than any of our other sisters out there. You’re not. The system and most Canadians don’t give a shit about you…

•   Don’t be tricked into thinking that wearing a ribbon for a day, or signing a petition, or composing a tweet, or writing an article is going to change anything on its own…

•   Finally, don’t be tricked into thinking someone else will do this work. You are that “someone else.” Loretta knew this. That’s why she was working so hard on uncovering the truth about murdered and missing women.

Honour Loretta. Don’t be tricked.

The thing is, I knew about murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada before Loretta Saunders’ death—women whose disappearances and deaths the authorities mostly could not be bothered to solve. I edit releases for the Aboriginal Justice team for CPTnet. If I were working with the team in Canada, I would have gladly joined demonstrations and put my skills to work on behalf of this issue. In fact, I have edited hundreds of releases describing many horrible things over the years, but for some reason, Willow Deplorable’s comment, “Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love” was like a raft that carried me past the word “issue,” and forced me to face the agony of the people who loved these women.

And then that raft left Canada. It was 1999; I was with Lakota friends in South Dakota who were telling me about their ancestors’ bodies displayed like animal specimens in museums and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers flooding their sacred burial grounds along the Missouri river. I was in college in the 1980s learning of other bodies tortured and dumped by the roadside in El Salvador and Guatemala, disposed of by men trained in the U.S. to terrorize civilian populations. It was 1998; I was viewing the photos of Mayans from Union Progreso in Chiapas who had been stripped naked and cut open by the Mexican military and returned to their families that way. I was reading the reports of how paramilitaries slaughtered and mutilated Las Abejas, our partners in Chiapas from 1998-2001. It was 2001-2003 and I was editing reports of my CPT colleagues and friends pulling bodies and parts of bodies out rivers in Colombia, bodies who had been teachers, and farmers, and labor organizers and some of whom would remain unidentified—all to teach the people in the Magadalena Medio Region that rightwing paramilitaries were in control.

“Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love”does not completely capture what I felt as I wept for these poor abused bodies, and the people who lived in them and their loved ones, but it echoes the sentiment. Willow Deplorable’s Tumblr comment begins with outrage, lays bare the awful truth, and then ends with compassion.
,
And as I said earlier, the tenacity of its grip around my heart seems like something spiritual.

AAARGH! I can’t believe I missed the Bellwether Prize deadline!

Probably the biggest “triumph” of my literary career was my selection as a finalist in Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize a decade or so ago. The prize has since morphed into the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. That, dear reader, is the fiction that I write. So far, it is the only fiction that I know how to write, the only fiction that emerges from that deep compelling place, the stories that push and butt inside me until my only choices are to write them or become mentally ill.

My second novel, Because the Angels, at 50,000 words ended up being too short for the Bellwether Prize, and I was sad about it, but I didn’t really grieve for long, because the novel was really as long as it was supposed to be, and I thought that by the next time the Bellwether Prize rolled around, I would have another novel ready.

And it was, and I missed the deadline. And I missed the deadline because I was working with my human rights organization in Hebron for the month of October and mid-December through mid-February, so I didn’t see the Poets and Writers listing. But really, that’s no excuse. If I had been wanting to submit this novel for the Bellwether Prize, I should have been paying attention to the deadline, and I didn’t and now it’s too late.

AAAAARGH! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

I am trying not to lapse into magical thinking about this, as writers are wont to do. You know, like, “Well maybe God wanted me to miss this opportunity, so that the novel will have more of an impact in another situation.” (I confess I had plans involving clemency for Leonard Peltier.) Or “Just you wait writer-friend-who-didn’t-like-it; Ms. SuperAgent was thrilled to pull it out of the slush pile and is already optioning it off to Hollywood.”

As a spiritual discipline, I keep telling myself that neither God nor the publishing world owes me a thing.

But I also need something to keep me away from the spiral of self-loathing. The fact that my novel might very well not have sold in another two years and I can enter it then? Not super comforting. That the next one I’m beginning work on might be better? At this point it’s in such nebulous shape–in my head and a collection of notes, I have no way of knowing how good it’s going to be—it hasn’t reached the place that my other three did where everything begins to click.

I do pray that God will use my novels for good. Since they have secular as well as religious characters and some of those characters use profanity and follow sexual mores frowned upon by most religious publishers (and I’m pretty much fine with them the way they are), I know that some people might think that strange. But it’s true. I really do want God to use what I write to transform situations of oppression and sadness. I guess that prayer is the only comfort I have; it’s something I can do.

But still, AAAAARRRRRGH! (Really there’s nothing I can do.)

*******

In January, I wrote a Facebook post about my grief over losing Pete Seeger and the wise comments of a colleague (a young Palestinian woman from Ramallah who had never heard of him) about why I was grieving. I felt a little “smiley hurt” reading an article in the February issue of Rolling Stone, that echoed her comments

Mikal Gilmore referred to Seeger singing at Barack Obama’s inauguration this verse from “This Land is Your Land”:

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

That moment heartened many of us, perhaps discomfited others, but both reactions were validations: Pete Seeger was finally singing to all of America as its redeemed native son, as a loved and revered hero. The day he died, we immediately understood, we’d never see anybody like him again.

For those interested, I also wrote a blog post about Seeger in January: http://www.kathleenkern.net/human-rights/hearing-about-pete-seeger-in-palestine/

SOUTH HEBRON HILLS: Umm al-Kher facing settler attacks, settlement expansion and a lawsuit from Karmel

This release was something I wrote up after my teammate Gabriel and I went out to the South Hebron Hills on Monday and Tuesday to fulfill our commitment to accompany Al-Fakheit school and the SUV donated by UNICEF and the government of Japan to bring the children to Al-Fakheit and Khirbet al-Majaz schools (the schools have demolition orders and the SUV has been confiscated by the Israeli military). We were with EAPPI, Ta’ayush, and Operation Dove at the Umm al-Kher meeting. In the end the people there were more upset that the Palestinian authority was giving a lot more aid to people in much less precarious positions than they were in.

SOUTH HEBRON HILLS: Umm al-Kher facing settler attacks, settlement expansion and a lawsuit from Karmel

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Christian Peacemaker Teams Palestine

SOUTH HEBRON HILLS: Umm al-Kher facing settler attacks, settlement expansion and a lawsuit from Karmel

Umm al-Kher is a village of about 135 people from the al-Hathaleen Bedouin who fled from their original lands near the Israeli city of Arad in during the war of 1948 to the South Hebron Hills. They subsequently suffered the further bad luck of having the Israeli settlement of Karmel move next door in the early 1980s. Water pipes and electricity run through their land to the settlement, but the Israeli Civil Administration does not allow residents of Umm al-Kher are to connect to the grid. They use solar panels for electricity and firewood, goat and sheep dung to fuel their stoves. They derive almost all their income from their flocks.

CPTers went out to Umm al-Kher on 3 February with a representative of the United Nations because of some recent attacks by Karmel settlers on the villagers. Since men of the village had received threats of arrest if they got into altercations again with the settlers, women had been taking the sheep and goats to their grazing land, but settlers had attacked them as well.

At issue is the route along which the villagers had been herding their flocks to the grazing field. Settlers had prevented the shepherds from taking a direct route across a hilltop, planting trees as a way of staking a claim to it. (A representative of the Israeli group, Ta’ayush, at the meeting pointed out that Karmel is planning on establishing a new neighborhood there, so these trees will be uprooted if they succeed in doing so.) The shepherds must take a forty-minute detour if they cannot cross the hilltop, which is harmful to their pregnant ewes; one pregnant ewe had died after making the longer walk.

The community’s taboun oven has also long been a target of the Karmel settlers’ anger, because they object to the smoke emitted when the residents of Umm al-Kher are baking bread. The settlers have tried to destroy the taboun several times and are currently suing the community for 100,000 shekels for the damage they say the smoke is causing to their health. As the U.N. representatives were discussing options that might make the taboun more acceptable, Ta’ayush members strongly backed the villagers, who did not want to switch to a source of fuel for which they would have to pay. The Ta’ayush activists asserted that the taboun had been there long before Karmel had, and Umm al-Kher should not have to make compromises to accommodate the settlers.

An Umm al-Kher resident noted that one of the Karmel settlers who has committed attacks on community before is a police officer at the settlement of Kiryat Arba, which borders Hebron. “I see him leaving for work every morning in his police uniform,” he said. “I know if I respond to his attacks, I would be charged with assaulting a police officer.”

Despite these difficulties, the residents of Umm al-Kheir have decided they do not need internationals living in their village all the time, but rather would prefer they be available on an on-call basis. (An EAPPI unit lives in Yatta and Operation Dove lives in At-Tuwani. CPT spends an overnight in the South Hebron Hills once a week.) The court has recognized their right to access their grazing lands and they do not believe that the lawsuit against the taboun will succeed. However, when one looks at its dwellings made of recycled materials and compares them to the expanding, western-style housing of Karmel, its situation seems precarious indeed.

[Note: This 2009 video of home demolitions in Umm al-Kher profiles Ta’ayush activist Ezra Nawi, who was present and providing translation for Umm Al-Kheir residents at the 3 February 2014 meeting.]

Hearing about Pete Seeger in Palestine

I was imagining Pete Seeger’s death almost four decades before his mortality finally caught up with him. Given as I was to melodrama and pathos in my teenage years, I imagined myself making a pilgrimage to his grave, via a freight train box car with my guitar, and then laying on top of his final resting place, weeping, at which point some like-minded devotees and possible family members would take me in and I would begin a new life as a folk musician/activist.

Why did I think such a scenario was likely to happen? Well apart from my being delusional, I’m sure part of it came from the Seeger persona arising from the albums I listened to until the grooves had worn thin. I remember staring at the cover of The Children’s Concert at Town Hall album on which he is serenading a little girl in a pinafore on high stool and wishing with all my heart that I were that girl. That he was singing to me. I’m sure many children and adults felt that he was doing exactly that. When he performed, when he led singing, he gave of himself in a way that eliminated the distance between performer and audience. And when you read about his relationships with the various people he met as part of activism for civil rights and the environment, it wasn’t a far stretch to imagine that if you stopped by to see him while he was chopping wood, he might very well treat you as a friend. (And I guess my teenage delusions extended that to friends and family members.)

Many years later, after I started working for Christian Peacemaker Teams, I was listening to a tribute album put out by Appleseed Records in which various recording artists sang songs he had written or made famous. One of them “Those three are on my mind,” about the murders of civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman I found particularly haunting. He wrote in the liner notes about what it was like to be performing in a small southern church when news arrived that the bodies had been found. And it hit me that at that time, no one in that church knew that the struggle for voting rights and an end to segregation would be successful. In fact, it probably looked very far away. But Seeger and the people in that church chose to keep moving forward anyway, even though they didn’t know how the struggle would end.

I wrote a column about this experience for the Mennonite Weekly Review and sent it to Appleseed records. Months later, I received in the mail his songbook, where have All the Flowers Gone: A Sing-a-long Memoir, autographed with a message “Keep on…” (And I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember the rest.)

My husband, knowing my affection for Seeger, bought tickets for the annual Western New York Peace Center banquet at which Seeger performed this fall. He looked very frail, and his memory gave out a couple times when he was singing some of his old standards. One delightful thing he remembered and sang as a tribute to his late wife, Toshi Seeger were the additional verses to “Turn, Turn, Turn” she had added for their children:

A time for work, a time for play
A time for night, a time for day
A time to sleep, a time to wake
A time for candles on the cake.

A time to dress, a time to eat
A time to sit and rest your feet
A timer to teach, a time to learn
A time for all to take their turn.

A time to cry and make a fuss
A time to leave and catch the bus
A time for quiet, a time for talk
A time to run, a time to walk.

A time to get, a time to give
A time to remember, a time to forgive
A time to hug, a time to kiss
A time to close your eyes and wish.

A time for dirt, a time for soap
A time for tears, a time for hope
A time for fall, a time for spring
A time to hear the robins sing.

It was Pete Seeger’s time to die; it was his time for peace. I am writing from the Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories, and I do not see an end to the daily assaults on human dignity this occupation imposes happening any time soon. But I choose to believe that those who care about justice and peace will overcome the efforts of short-sighted politicians who think only in terms of control and personal gain. I choose to “keep on. . .”

And I will remember that singing helps.

(Oh and just when you thought you couldn’t love him any more, you should know he donated royalties from “Turn, turn, turn” to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.)

The loss of an orchard and one family’s endless creativity

[Note: I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing lately, just not here. Below is a piece I posted on the team’s blog.

I’ve modified it a bit, because in the Abu Haikels’ papers, Chaim Bajaio refers to the Jewish religious foundation in Hebron by the Arabic term “waqf”, but other Palestinians thought that would be too confusing to put in our own piece. I sort of like the idea that a waqf was a waqf in Hebron. Arabic was the first language of the Jewish community before 1929.]

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Christian Peacemaker Teams Palestine

For Majd Abu Haikel’s graduation project from Al Quds University, she was supposed to take an object’s photograph and then paint a vision of what it could become. The object she chose was one familiar to all the residents of Tel Rumeida in the city of Al-Khalil/Hebron: a tree destroyed by settlers. She painted the dead almond tree bursting into blossom. That painting hangs in the home of her parents, Feryal and Abdel Aziz Abu Haikel, who, in spite of decades of settler and soldier violence, have managed to raise eleven children on Tel Rumeida. They have gone on to university and careers but remain close-knit and determined to stay where they are in spite of all the efforts of the Tel Rumeida settlers to get them to move.

The newest blow to the Abu Haikel family happened on 5 January 2013, when a bulldozer leveled their sixty-year old almond orchard and installed a caravan (mobile home) in preparation for yet another expansion of the Hebron settlement enterprise. The father of Abdel Aziz Abu Haikel, Rateb Abu Haikel, had sublet the land from Chaim Bajaio, a member of Hebron’s original pre-1929 Jewish community (whose family the Abu Haikels rescued from the 1929 massacre.) Bajai had leased it on behalf of the Jewish Waqf (religious foundation) from the Islamic Waqf, run by Tamim Adari. In 1949, after the West Bank came under Jordanian rule, it was transferred to the Custodian of Enemy property, which, after the 1967 war, was renamed Custodian of Absentee property and came under the control of the Israeli government. Throughout the changes in government and names, the Abu Haikels continued to pay a rental fee of ten Jordanian dinar every year on the land.

In 1980, the government of Israel stopped accepting the Abu Haikels’ money, although they kept trying to pay each year. The Zakaria Bakri family, which had a lease agreement similar to that of the Abu Haikels, also had their lease payments blocked and in 1984 had the settlement of Ramat Yishai move on to their land: six caravans (mobile homes) with six families, among them the family of Baruch Marzel who had a reputation for instigating much of the violence in Hebron in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1999, the Israeli DCO finally allowed Abdel Aziz Abu Haikel to pay his rental fees for the land from 1980 onward in a lump sum. He paid three years in advance, for two plots containing the family’s cherry and almond orchards. In 2002, the DCO again stopped accepting payments and fenced in both orchards, but said they would give keys to the family, a promise it never fulfilled. Years later, when settlers attempted to cultivate the orchard plots and the Abu Haikels complained, the Israeli authorities told the monitoring group, TIPH, that the land was Israeli state land.

The Abu Haikels believed that at some point the Israeli DCO would allow them to make another lump sum payment as they had previously, but instead, it appears that the Israeli government may have chosen the old strategy of preventing Palestinians from cultivating land, and then claiming that because it was uncultivated, it was now state land. Its plans are to turn it into an archeological park like Silwan (more about that in an upcoming release I’m working on.)

Arwa Abu Haikel, who now lives in Sheffield, United Kingdom, but joined the family for an interview via Skype, told a CPTer, “I didn’t realize how much pressure we live under until I came to the U.K.” She still marvels at the way her neighbors in Sheffield smile at her when they pass in the street, having grown up among Israeli settlers who wished to do her harm. She has vision problems from a 1999 settler pogrom in Tel Rumeida when settlers hit her on the head with a baseball bat, and a knee problem when a soldier kicked her and her husband in 2008. “But emotionally,” she said, “I’m still here” [in Tel Rumeida.]

When the CPTer conducting the interview asked the family how it is that their children, despite emotional and physical scars such as these, have become successful, caring individuals. Marwa Abu Haikel, a civil engineer said, “We believe in the creativity coming from struggle.”

Human Rights

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