30 March 2007

 

Preamble

An admittedly belated post, but aptly so. For it is a post with a subject, and the subject is banality. It's all so banal. And when it's banal, it' s hard to get yourself to write about it. Hannah Arendt made famous the idea of the banality of evil. 'Evil' is a word I dislike, and I'll leave it to Arendt[i] to define. For my purposes here I'd rather we think of this: 'the concerted ability to treat others as if they were not people of worth.' Perhaps a better way to think of it is to consider it as the opposite of the old Jewish dictum of Hillel the Elder and Rabbi Akiva that you must 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you', (Seeing as some of us are sadomasochists and others are not, this usually means asking the other how they want to be treated, which then leads logically to Emanuel Kant's famous injunction that you must treat people as ends and not merely as means. But I digress.) For brevity, and only for brevity, I will call such action evil.

Ariel Again

About a month ago now, on a Wednesday, I travelled with Yesh Din to the police station in Ariel. On the way we met up with two Palestinian men, who waited for us by the roadside. They were father ad son: the father in his sixties, the son in his thirties. We drove to Ariel, called the police to come and collect us from the checkpoint, and eventually were waved through; the policeman couldn't be bothered to come down.

Their story I will give in brief, for it is not the point of this post. They were on their land when a group of settlers attacked them. They called the (Israeli) army for assistance. The army came and arrested the two Palestinian men, hitting the younger in the back of his head with the butt of a rifle, knocking him unconscious. We sat and waited in the corridor of the Ariel police station, as the story was clarified by the younger man, he himself a policeman. He is a tall man, broad, with a face that looks as though it's been chiselled from granite. He works as an assistant to the Palestinian Authority's police commander in Nablus, not far from Ariel. But he used to hold a post in Ramallah, where he claims to have been in the Mukattah, (Yasser Arafat's headquarters), when it was besieged for three weeks by the Israeli army in 2001. I, for one, believed him. The irony of a proud, large and intelligent policeman begging mercies from a superior police force was lost on no-one. So we sat, waiting, in an airless corridor with no windows.

We waited and waited. We talked about family and land, work in Tel-Aviv and police work, studies and women. The father urged against mirage. The son, who has a young family of his own, quietly disagreed. Eventually, we were informed by a friendly policeman that the national police computer network had collapsed, and that as the id. parade they would be asked to view was computerised, we would have to wait. They said they knew the people who had attacked them, but that was utterly beside the point. All in all, we waited almost four hours. Four hours in a dull and bleak mini-maze of airless corridors. The people were interesting, but the situation utterly banal, and utterly boring too. However important the geopolitical forces struggling in this small stretch of land, however bloody a bomb here in Tel-Aviv or a helicopter missile attack in Gaza, on the ground, in the territories, under the fingernails of the occupation, it is dull and banal.

Think back to previous posts. To Qiryat Arba, to the Ariel police station, better described there, to the DCO, or the court at Salem. The issues may be existential, but the day-to-day practice trudges on, same as the day before, in well lit streets or un-adorned, pre-fabricated offices. People go about doing their jobs and living their lives, being normal. This is how you control another people's land. Yes by convincing yourself that it belongs to you, (the truth of which remains debateable: according to the bible it's undeniable, and I for one think that such truths are subjective). But the settlers in the large settlement blocks and the authorised red-roofed settlements, and the bureaucrats in their offices live normal lives. Normality is their criterion of success, for if it's normal then it cannot be wrong. In cities like Tel-Aviv and London, or Haifa and New York, people go out looking for something different, a break from their existence at home and at work, a break from their same-as-the-day-before lives. They go to cafes, bars and pubs, go clubbing through the night. They go travelling, or to sun themselves on the beach. Their kids often dress up as punks or Goths, hippies, scallies, etc. Anything to escape normally. But not in the territories. There the criterion is normality. This blog has a namesake. It too is the West Bank Blog. It's written by a family of settlers who, in their introduction go a long way to say how normal their lives are. Normality legitimises. But the lady doth protest too much.


[i] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil, (Penguin, London, 1963).


nb. The feeling might be given by these post that the Palestinians are wonderful and innocent, the Israelis evil and belligerent. This is not the case. But this blog is dedicated to adventures and misadventures in the West Bank, in the underbelly of the occupation. Naturally with the Israeli organisations I travel there with, I come across cases where my people's self appointed representatives or my nation's army are seen in not the best of lights. My home in Tel-Aviv is surrounded by places where suicide bombers have murdered civilians. But the latter is not the subject of this blog.



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