Some hope in dark times

I’m writing this with more hope in my heart than I have felt in a long time.

Nearly 30 years ago, I spent time in the middle east. I travelled through Greece and Turkey to Syria, where I met Manal, a young woman, my age, who I met in an outside café. She was dressed in jeans. She was smoking like a movie-star with her long chestnut hair fluttering in the warm breeze. The only two women in the café, we were curious about each other. I had not seen a woman like her in Damascus and she hadn’t met too many Samoan-New Zealand women wandering about her city. We took an instant liking to each other and she invited me to stay with her, her mum and younger sister in their family apartment in Damascus for the better part of a month. We had a great time together.

This Damascus was the ancient and beautiful Damascus as it was in 1997, before it became the devastated place that it is now. Syria then, was under the rule of dictator, Al- Assad senior – no tea party by any stretch of the imagination, but if you were careful, you could be a woman like Manal and scrape by.

I think of Manal often and hope she is still alive and OK. And her mum and her little sister and her boyfriend, Hani and her sister-in-law (who played the bass guitar in an underground metal band) who I got to know over that month – I hope they are all alive. I hope they are all OK.

From Syria I travelled in Jordan and eventually took a boat to the south Sinai coast of Egypt where I lived for a year. It wasn’t so much a plan to stay for a year in Egypt as much as it was a days-kept-passing-and-I-kept-staying kind of thing. To stay in Egypt for more than 3 months, you had to leave the country and re-enter. This was pretty easy since Israel was only a three-hour drive away. Every three months I took a share-taxi to Israel and once I was there, I would end up staying for days or weeks wandering about before returning back to Egypt.

For most of the time I lived in Egypt I worked at a scuba-diving site on the Red Sea called The Canyon, a literal underwater canyon which is a few kilometers away from The Blue Hole, unimaginatively called that because it is an underwater blue hole, that if memory serves me correctly is over 100m deep.

The Canyon is on the edge of the Sinai desert. The Sinai mountains loom in the distance behind it and to the front, Saudi Arabia is just 20kms across the narrow part of the Red Sea. I wasn’t a dive-guide at the Canyon or anything exotic like that (although I did get to dive a lot). I was the girl at the counter who handed out the equipment. Israelis often came diving at the Canyon. The diving was better and cheaper than on the Israeli side.

I made a number of Israeli friends while I worked at the Canyon, including a family from Beersheva who I visited and stayed with a number of times, both when I lived in Egypt and later when I lived in London.

When I finally left Egypt, I went to Ethiopia, where I met, an Israeli woman a little younger than me. She had been in the army (like the large majority of Israeli young people) and afterwards went to university where she studied anthropology. Her politics have increasing moved towards the hard left and peace. She is also an Arab Jew, her people hailing from Yemen.

Adira and I travelled together for 6 months through Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. She became a close friend, who unlike Manal, didn’t disappear into the bombed-out disaster zone that Damascus became.

Fast forward 8 years and I’d moved back to Aotearoa, begun a life as a poet and was invited to the Jerusalem Poetry Festival. I made new Israeli friends at the festival, one in particular who I will call Sarah. We became friends and stayed in touch for 18 years.

Since the Gaza Holocaust, my relationships with my Israeli friends has become very strained. I have been trying to figure out how to maintain the friendships – particularly my friendship with Sarah – while also being completely opposed to the Israeli governments’ apartheid and genocide. It’s become impossible. Sarah began posting the same talking points that we have all seen and heard again and again: focusing only on the 230 people taken during 7 October and completely ignoring the genocide of 13, 000 children and 47,000 adults. Not to mention the untold injured and homeless; the forced starvation and other atrocities that we now know about – unless you’ve purposely glued your eyes and ears shut for the past couple of years.

When Israel is not just some faceless, murderous mob, but when they are a collection of friends: when they are Miriam who helped me get a safe abortion in Israel (rather than go all the way back to New Zealand); when they are Shira who was with me in Tel Aviv after the Jerusalem Poetry Festival a decade later when I discovered I was pregnant again and I was now ready to be a mother; when they are Adi who helped me get back my passport after I’d been robbed at knife point. He was fresh out of the army and when I met up with him a couple of years later in Israel and he had been accepted to drama school, he was looking forward to a new, less violent, career. When Israelis are friends who I have had long and meaningful relationships with, it is hard to know how to reconcile them with the people who send their daughters and sons, or who are themselves the daughters and sons; who are among those who commit the atrocities on Palestinians that we are now all too familiar with.

Yesterday I was reconciled with Adira after seeing what she had posted: she was unearthing the narrative she was taught from childhood and urging other Israelis to look at this society-wide brainwashing square in the face. Somehow, I had missed the important bits between her initial reaction (in a short pm to me soon after the 7 October) and now. When I read this I nearly wept. I was so relieved my dear friend was conscious of the genocide and taking a stand against it.

Since yesterday, Adira and I have been messaging back and forth from Africa, where she now lives, to Colombia, where I have been for the Medellin poetry festival. I am writing this 10058 metres up in the air somewhere over the Pacific Ocean between Santiago and Aotearoa. By the time you read this I will be back in Christchurch.

Adira has been explaining to me what it has been like questioning the belief system that she was taught to embrace since she was a little girl; the belief system so many Israelis still hold tight to. She is taking apart this belief system in public and daring her country-people to do this for themselves.

We also talked about how at the moment it is all too easy to tar all Israelis with the same brush; that the heinous actions of the Israeli government and IDF are not the same as the actions and beliefs of every single Israeli person. I’m sure many of you have watched *videos of young people who are publicly refusing to be conscripted into the IDF and other Israeli anti-genocide activists.

This is why I feel hope tonight. Because if one woman who was brought up under this regime can question it and turn away from it and call for justice then other Israelis can. Each one is a light in this present darkness.

As I sit here in this hurtling hollow object in a frozen sky over an almost never-ending ocean, I press play on No Other Land, a documentary made by Basel Adra, a young Palestinian man from Masafer Yatta, in the occupied territories, which is very close to Beersheva where my family of friends live. Perhaps they have passed it a hundred-hundred times. Perhaps I passed it on the way to stay with them.

Basel’s story does what all good documentary stories must – bring you in close to people who are just like you. Basel makes friends with Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who wants people in Israel to understand what Basel, his family and all Palestinians suffer from ‘settlers’ backed by the army and engineered by the government. This film was made in 2019-2023, before the current genocide.

I haven’t been able to make myself watch No Other Land before now because just getting through the news every day fills me with despair and rage: how many dead Palestinian children today; how many Gazan hospitals bombed (are there even any left?); how many Palestinians exterminated at food distribution points; how many bombings in Syria; which genocidal war-monger has nominated which genocidal war-monger for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But, today, with some hope in my heart, I can watch Basel’s story and write to you.

*https://www.facebook.com/reel/760180826542613 https://www.facebook.com/reel/698167662894030