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.”

Yummy foods I have been eating in Palestine

Hi kids!

We’ve been awfully busy, with school patrol, a house fire, clashes and a trip out to Firing Zone 918 and you know I don’t have opposable thumbs, so Kathy hasn’t been able to type this very important post about yummy foods we have been eating. Last week we went with some of our friends from EAPPI to have a yummy barbecue dinner Youth Against the Settlements was hosting up at Tel Rumeida:

Kathy wrote up a review of the evening for the TripAdvisor Facebook Page.

After our winter work day we went out with our friend Hamed Qawasme, his daughter Rama, and our EAPPI friends to a restaurant called Falafel Kingdom. Maurice liked it so much, he decided he wanted to go there for his final meal before he left the country and to celebrate his 27 years as an ordained priest. Our friends Sami and Yussuf came too! One night, our teammate Christopher, Kathy and I were the only ones home for dinner. He made stuffed pepper in three pretty colors, and then he found vegetarian jello and put dried apricots and pomegranate seeds in it. Then we put condensed milk on top. Super Duper pretty and super yummy!

Oh also we had a wonderful day off at Kibbutz Harel with Kathy’s friends Aviva and Avner. she forgot to take a picture of the food. But she did take a picture of the nice warm bedroom! And she loved the shower!Well, that’s all for now! Next time, maybe I’ll tell you about some of the fun I had in the South Hebron Hills!

On Stone Throwing and Strategies

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Christian Peacemaker Teams Palestine

Soldiers preparing to fire tear gas on boys throwing stones about 100 meters away

by Kathleen Kern

[Note: The following first appeared on the CPT Palestine blog in a slightly condensed form ]

Years ago in our Hebron apartment, we had a foam cushion insert on which someone had drawn a smiling face. We dubbed it “Happy Foam Square,” and would throw it at a wall when our work got frustrating. Doing so was surprisingly cathartic.

So in a small way, I understand why throwing stones feels good. I also understand, when I see the posters of small boys throwing stones at tanks, that their actions are brave. I understand why the narrative of an occupied people resisting one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world with rocks and Molotov cocktails is a source of pride in some circles.

But monitoring clashes in Hebron has always been one of my least favorite things to do, because we have almost no impact on the situation, and so little strategy is involved on the part of the Palestinian boys throwing things. They do it because it feels good, because it helps take the edge of the humiliation of the Israeli military occupation, and they just don’t think about the consequences to themselves, their families, or the people living and working in the staging area for these clashes.

In some situations, a thrown stone can literally grant a soldier a license to kill or can result in months, even years in jail for Palestinian youth. We have seen boys as young as eight taken away on suspicion of stone throwing. (Israeli settler youth are never arrested for throwing stones at Palestinians.) In one case, I witnessed soldiers detain children because they were wearing balaclavas in the cold weather; they told me the masks proved the boys were intending to throw stones (For more information on what happens to children accused of throwing stones, see Occupied Childhoods. Newly released report on violation of children’s rights in Hebron.)

On school days, we monitor two checkpoints through which students and teachers must walk to get to school. At one checkpoint, almost every day, schoolboys throw stones at Border Police and Border Police respond with tear gas and sound bombs. One young mother told me, exasperated, “If they weren’t here, the boys would not throw stones.” And it’s true. If the soldiers, for the fifteen minutes before the school bell rang just went around the corner, had a cup of coffee, and let the principals shoo the children into the schoolyards, this dreary daily theatrical production would not take place.

Stone throwing at the Qitoun checkpoint happens less often, but last week, it had a tragic consequence for a family in the line of fire. After a volley of stones lasting less than a minute, a Border Police officer shot tear gas from a nearby rooftop at the boys. He missed, and it went into a family’s home and caught something on fire. They lost everything.

So do I think Palestinian children should stop throwing stones? Of course. Apart from my own pacifist beliefs, I see it having no positive outcomes for the children and teenagers. But there is a reason that societies hold adults more responsible than children for their negative actions, and the soldiers firing the teargas and rubber bullets at stone throwers are at least nominal adults. And the strategists running this stupid, immoral occupation passed the threshold of adulthood a long, long time ago.

Christmas in Bethlehem 2013

Hi kids!

So a lot of things in Bethlehem were the same as other years in Bethlehem. There were a lot people selling balloons to children.And lots of Santa Clauses and people dressed like Santa Claus everywhere.

When we went to look at the big Creche in Manger Square we saw that a lot of parents wanted to take pictures of their children with Baby Jesus in the Creche.

So I had Kathy and Christopher take pictures of me in the Creche, too!

But for most Palestinian Christians like Christians all over the world Christmas is about remembering the birth of Jesus and spending time with your family, so they go to their churches for special services and then do a LOT of visiting. Sometimes like twelve visits a day! Christopher and Kathy and I went to the Christmas Lutheran Church. Kathy and I really like the services there, which are in German, English and Arabic. This year, they moved to a bigger room in the Fellowship Hall, but dozens of people still ended up having to stand. They did the sending words in a bunch of different languages.Then we all sang “Silent Night” in our own languages and lit candles. I took a picture of Christopher and Kathy after the service.
Christopher went out to dinner with some people who are working for the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, but Kathy was tired, so she walked back to the house of her friends, Issa and Diana, where she usually stays over Christmas. The square looked different after dark!

When we got back, some of Issa and Diana’s friends were making some yummy Indian food! We were really hungry and Kathy hadn’t had Indian food for a long time!

Well, we’re back in Hebron now. It’s the third day of Christmas. Where are my three french hens?

Love, Markie

Goodbye to my column

In 1998, Paul Schrag from the Mennonite Weekly Review called me and asked if I would be interested in taking over the “World Neighbors” column from Willard Unruh. Every month since that time, I have written a column about countries on five different continents.

I think doing so made me a better writer. I found that I actually liked it when I was about twenty to thirty words over the limit, because cutting out those words invariably made the column tighter and stronger (Paul told me once that my columns were hard to cut, because I didn’t leave surplus words.) I also enjoyed doing deeper research into regions that were in the news, and liked to look for the “behind the scenes” stories. Once I had easy access to the internet (I take it for granted now, but I began this column at a time when I needed to go to the library to do web research) I would google “Mennonite” and the country involved to find out what Mennonite missionaries and aid and development workers were saying about political crises on the ground. Then, I would look for other alternative news sources that were covering aspects of the story that the mainstream media was not. (I remember once, in the buildup to the Iraq War, writing my column on Donald Rumsfeld’s friendly relations with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. After I sent it in, it turned out to be Newsweek’s cover story for the week. When I wrote that I was bummed Newsweek had scooped me to assistant editor, Robert Rhodes, he said something along the lines of, “Don’t worry; no one reads that rag.”)

During the first week in December, I was at Evangelicals for Social Action conference, where I learned that Israeli authorities had just denied entry to one of my colleagues into Palestine. I was also feeling anxious about my own entry, wondering whether Israeli authorities would give me a hard time because I had just left the country six weeks earlier in October. And I was agonizing over a contest I had entered my novel, The Price We Paid, in, hoping in an almost sickening way that it would bring the manuscript to the attention of an agent.

Then I got the e-mail. When the Mennonite Weekly Review had become the Mennonite World Review, I had been informed that my column would now be shared with two other people and I would thus be writing only three times a year. This e-mail informed me that some plural entity had decided that World Neighbors needed a more “consistent voice” and they were asking another person to write it.

My first reaction was more annoyance than anything else. My column had been taken from Willard Unruh and given to me (and I could tell from his final column that he had been a little hurt by it.) The editor could have just told me that he thought it was time for someone else to write it. In a follow-up e-mail, he told me that he was trying to be diplomatic and that at fifteen years, I had been the longest running columnist in the history of the Mennonite Weekly/World Review. And although I thought “diplomatic” was not the right word at all, the follow-up e-mail did make me feel better.

The Mennonite Weekly Review giveth and the Mennonite World Review taketh away. Blessed be the Mennonite World Review.

Shoveling with a Squeegee

This is Maurice and me.

Hi kids!

Kathy, Maurice and I worked pretty hard yesterday. The people from EAPPI told us they were going to help clear the snow away from Qurtuba School and the nearby Samidoon kindergarten so the children could get to their classes next day and invited us to help. So Maurice and Kathy and I went over yesterday to do that. Our friend Hamed and his daughter Rama also came.

Like I said in my last post, it doesn’t really snow here, so there weren’t snow shovels for people to buy. Hamed tried to buy some regular shovels, but they had all been bought so he could only buy hoes and pick axes. We cleared a path to the kindergarten and to the toilets behind the kindergarten. It would have been a lot faster with a snow shovel!Then we started cleaning the schoolyard at Qurtuba School. I thought we would never get all the snow in the whole yard cleaned up! We were using brooms and squeegees to push the snow to the sides as well as the hoes and the shovels. Kathy was really glad to take over on a squeegee, because her back was getting sore. She worked on pushing melting snow down a drain as the sun began to melt it. After we were done, the schoolyard looked like this:Then Maurice and Kathy and I all went out to lunch with the EAPPI people and Hamed and Rama to the Royal Kingdom restaurant. It was yummy!

The Selfish Writer, #Pitchwars, #Pitchmas, and Yes My Novel is Not the Center of the Universe

Most people, if asked to describe me, would not choose “selfish” as one of their first adjectives. Working for a human rights organization gives one an altruistic sheen, not always deserved, or not completely anyway. Most human rights workers, honest ones, will readily come up with a list of less altruistic reasons they do the work they do. They thought it sounded it like an interesting thing to do for a few years before their “real” careers began; they had friends doing the work; they like to travel; human rights workers are hilarious and often fun to be around (it’s true!)

And then there are the human rights people who are working out “issues” that I won’t go into here.

Hajji Hussein (with child on lap) was a political prisoner for whom CPT’s Iraqi Kurdistan team advocated. He was freed right after an Urgent Action e-mail Campaign we sent out on CPTnet. And right after #Pitchwars. Yes. Hajji Hussein’s freedom was really more important. Really.

I’m writing this entry because I’ve been really conscious over the last couple weeks of how my attention has NOT been focused on the needs of the people my organization serves, nor on the people near and dear to me. Pretty much, all I have been able to think about is getting my novel noticed by an agent.

It all started with the #Pitchwars contest. The premise of the contest is that “mentors”—agented authors, agents’ assistants or other people who have connections in the literary world, read the query letters and the first five pages of the novel that the authors are submitting to the contest and choose one author and two alternates to mentor. Then they read the entire manuscript and help the author sharpen both the manuscript and query for submission to an agent.

I got a mentor interested in my submission based on our shared interest in Joss Whedon, although she was upfront about it being outside her genre, and I began obsessively following the #Pitchwars Twitterfeed to watch her and the other three agents to whom I submitted discussing the entries. Now, I was getting ready to leave the country for another two-month assignment with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT); I needed to get my three substitute editors situated to take over CPTnet while I was gone; CPT was doing its end of the year fundraising push. I was very conscious that my mind needed to focus on other things.

I think it was at the meeting of my church’s Pastoral Ministry committee when we were discussing the needs of people in my church that I felt the most selfish. The other three people on the committee were discussing these needs–some of them pretty dire–and I realized I hadn’t really been giving them any thought, because I so very, very passionately want my novel–The Price We Paid, formerly Shea–to be published. And this #Pitchwars contest had given me hope that a little mentoring might get me there.

With a little distance now, I know it was a good experience. I am still surprised by how approachable the mentors were to unpublished authors with questions and how much time they put into their responses to the people they chose not to mentor. I think I realized later that the contest was not for literary fiction, and hence, not the best venue for my novel. I don’t mean that in a snobbish sense, but in the sense that the mentors who were critiquing adult fiction had a background in commercial and genre fiction. The mentors who commented said I should look for agents who represented literary fiction.

I also got good ideas for sharpening my query. For example, I think I’m going to have to cut out the Hosea and Gomer reference from all future queries, which hurts a little, since Hosea’s love life was the epiphany that led to the novel. But in my last conversation with Jim Loney, who is taking over CPTnet part of the time when I’m gone, he told me he had forgotten the connection the novel had with the biblical story, and he’s one of the novel’s strongest advocates.

Right before I left, I did a 35 word pitch for the novel in #Pitchmas, knowing I’d be in Hebron when the “Winners” were announced (75 pitches get posted on a blog. Agents pick from among the pitches.) Usually, when I’m on assignment, the work has a way of engaging most of my attention, so I’m hoping the Twitter feed won’t take up as much of my time (our Hebron apartment has spotty internet, anyway.)

Years ago, when I got a fellowship to workshop my first novel manuscript with Lee K. Abbott, based on the first chapter I submitted, he asked if I had completed the novel. Upon learning I had, he said the good news was that most aspiring writers never do that. The bad news was that I would probably have to write five before I got published. And I do have the beginnings of a fourth beginning to inkle about in my brain.

But I am not finished with The Price We Paid. Apart from all the ignoble reasons I want it published, I believe in it; I believe it has a life and that I am supposed to advocate for that life. I just wish I were a better promoter.

UPDATE: My Twitter Pitch ( “A” stands for “Adult”) was not chosen for the 75 “Pitchmas” pitches: “A/ Literary Dystopian Iz cheats on his wife but also helps her bring down corrupt religious regime that rules U.S. during 2065-2089 #Pitchmas” Again, I’m not sure literary novels lend themselves to Twitter-length pitches.

Hurray! We’re in Hebron again!

Hi kids!

Kathy and I got into Jerusalem on Tuesday, but she had a headache on Wednesday, so we didn’t get to Hebron until Thursday. We were sad that we only got to work with Bob Holmes for one day! We worked with Bob during the Second Intifada ten years ago. He is a lot of fun, but he doesn’t like eating fruits or vegetables. He’s really afraid of pomegranates. But we miss him already. Sniff Sniff.

Right before Kathy and I arrived, Winter Storm Alexa hit Israel and Palestine and all the countries around them with a LOT of snow and rain. In Hebron, which is about 3,000 feet up, there was a lot of snow–like there is in Rochester during a couple bad days of blizzards, but no one here has snow plows or snow shovels. So it caused a lot of buildings and parts of buildings to fall down. Kathy and I will take some more pictures of that.

When we got here, several days after the blizzard ended there was still snow on the steps leading up from the women’s apartment to the roof. It keeps melting, so there’s always a little river running down the stairs, and we have to keep squeegeeing the water outside the door down the next flight of stairs because it collects into a little pond about 3″ deep outside our front door.

And it’s pretty cold inside the house. The downstairs apartment where the office is has a gas heater and an electric heater going, so it’s not too bad, but Kathy’s room is really, really cold. The little electric heater doesn’t help a lot. It only warms the part of your body that’s right next it. Kathy is always grateful to her mother-in-law Terri for giving her that black and gray wool dress that is too warm to wear anywhere that has central heating, so it is perfect to wear for winters in Hebron. In fact, she almost never takes it off. She wishes she could wear two pairs of wool socks with her shoes. Unicorns, of course have magic fur, so we’re fine in the cold or the heat, but we try not to be annoying about it.

Another easy entry after another denial of entry

After my easy entry and exit in October, I was expecting another easy entry, although I was expecting some scrutiny for having entered six weeks after I left the country. Then the Israeli authorities denied entry to my colleague Patrick during the first week of December and the anxieties began building again.

Bob is showing Christopher how to handle the finances. Maurice is standing behind them because I told him to.

When I exited the airplane, I noticed that shortly after I entered the terminal, a long time before I got to Passport Control, a crowd of people was standing. I was jetlagged, had a migraine and was preparing myself for a grilling, so I had only a vague impression that many of them were Latinos. One Israeli security person pulled aside a young man in his twenties who was just behind me, asked to see his passport and added him to the crowd. When I got to Passport Control, there were very few people in line. The young woman in the booth literally didn’t speak to me. She waved me forward, looked at my passport, printed out my visa and waved me on. I didn’t connect the two incidents until I got to my friends Ya’alah and Netanel’s apartment in Jerusalem—that the security people were pulling people aside before they got to Passport Control rather than Passport Control people sending “questionable” people to be interviewed by security.

I spent yesterday in Jerusalem because of a migraine, and upon arriving on team in Hebron this afternoon found that my new teammates Christopher and Maurice had had identical experiences. Israeli security pulled aside the “questionable” people i.e., anyone who was not white, or under thirty to forty years old, soon after they exited the plane. Christopher said he usually gets questioned, but he was deep in conversation with a German businessman as he was walking out of the plane, so the security people left him alone.

I’m going to leave it to Markie to discuss the level of snow and cold here from Winter Storm Alexa (yes they named it.) I’m a little sad that Bob Holmes, one of my favorite colleagues, is leaving tomorrow before I really get a chance to work with him. And Christopher and Maurice will leave in a couple weeks. And of course I was looking forward to working with Patrick; I had even bought Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime series Kids on a Slope to watch with him. At least Mona will be here (she’s at home in Ramallah today.) Girl power. Rah.

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