The Conversation

Having spent the semester planning for and throwing events for our student group, "Voices for Palestine," and therefore neglecting this blog, I have had both the opportunity to engage in and reflect on many of the elements of what I've come to call "The Conversation" concerning the Israel/ Palestine conflict.

From graffiti on school desks, to tabling events and showing films, to columns, blogs and passing conversation with friends, to the mainstream media and talking heads in Washington, the narrative of the conflict is all around us. If only more Americans would shake off complacency and the fear of stigma and engage in it, then perhaps a "just peace" wouldn't seem like such a ghost on the horizon.

In future posts I hope to share some of my experiences speaking with folks about the issue, addressing it in the press, and ruminating on some of the reasons people think the way they do about it. My goal is to smash the radio silence concerning Palestine, and usher in open dialog where voices are all-to-often mute.

I frame this effort, and the efforts of the student group "Voices for Palestine," in the tradition of The White Rose, an element of non-violent resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany who believed so wholeheartedly in speaking out against injustice that they paid the highest price. And while my keyboard-clicking will probably solicit little more than nasty emails, the resemblance comes from an inability to divorce the occupation of Palestine from my own sense of reality.

In other words:

Even if the conflict is "far away,"

or is merely one of many in the world,

or is so corrupted by politics and the media that we don't know where to start,

it is still a very real and blatant injustice, and the lives of those affected are worth speaking out for.

We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened society. When we speak of history we talk down to it, as though it were an ignorant child and not our own legacy. We'd like to think that had the reservations, the gulag, the cantons, and the concentration camps been built in our time, that we'd have stood up - we'd have said something. And yet the super-reservation still stands; its walls are still being built.

This blog exists to the end of that wall being torn down.

-aVFP