*commit no nuisance

Please let me sleep.
In the night-time, when it's dark
and everyone else is taking their part
in natural bodily mechanisms.
When the entire world is saying sleep
let me listen.
Let me hear the words and rest awhile.
Not hide away in wakeful solitude,
and not wander aimlessly through priviledged thoughts.
Please let me sleep.

I am an addict, justified by Kate Moss. I am a writer addicted to words. I am a dreamer, but I can't sleep. And when I do I don't dream. I am European, though I have barely spent more than a fortnight there, nor speak any of their languages to any level of proficiency. I am Australian, though I loathe the place and have no passion for cricket. I am committed, though I sometimes get a little distracted. I am a man, and take on all the responsibility that entails. Most of the time. I am a pragmatist, a realist, an idealist and a romantic. I am a smoker, though I am always thinking about quitting or have just started again. I am aspirational, with no further details currently available.

Blah blah blah wow this is so amazing like time i can see it it is a pendulum swinging slowly in tune with all the cosmos or something greater than i can see it is a lot to take it the available truth of reality downloaded uploaded swapped and traded made into a commodity bought and sold in the bazaar strange isn't it how we conjure up sleight of hand to disguise the bland nature of ordered patriachy without thesaurus is all this all there is for all of us? hard to say if you don't know how to pray or look ahead of today. whatever.

Do you know what happened today in history?

I'll tell you. On this day in 1948, three years after the end of the Second World War and with their Empire crumbling, British troops pulled out of Mandate Palestine. The next day, 15 May, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed.

They didn't take their time, didn't ask anyone's permission, they just arrived, bedraggled, exhausted and and ready to die, and started a new life. On someone else's land. They fought farmers with fire - as though they were fascists - and won.

What did they lose in those first few weeks of 'independence'? Just a little bit of their humanity, which had remained through the torments of the Holocaust. Has it been recovered? I would say not, from what I have seen in Jerusalem, in Nazareth, in Nablus and Hebron. I would say the Jews of Israel have become a people so afraid of losing what they have acquired that they have already lost it through scarification, and now continue on, oblivious to what has been lost, clutching at shadows that formerly existed as flesh.

I feel that today and tomorrow are sad days for anyone with any connection to the "Holy Land" - those few hundred square kilometres that humanity has not ceased fighting over since Biblical times. It is a sad time for anyone who believes that two peoples should be able to live side by side, and that differences, hostilities and mutual suspicion should not be insurmountable obstacles on the road to reconciliation.

Whether recognised as 'Independence Day' or 'al-Naqba' (the Catastrophe), the emotional gravity of these terms overrides all reason. There is only one way to see the event, and leading from that, there is only one way to view the events that follow, in a dutiful line, all the way up to the present day, 56 years later.

Paris in the Springtime?

I finally made it to Paris, almost a year to the day after I left Australia with that very idea on my mind. It was grand, really. Not the romantic ideal I had cultivated while swilling caffeine in Rue Babs and writing earnestly in my Moleskine, but the most comfortable place I had been since that fateful departure. I walked the streets, the beautiful streets, with Kara on my arm, and could still vaguely imagine a ‘studio’ and a scraping existence selling poetry or waiting tables or tricking tourists out of their spotless new Euro notes.

We filled our days with all the tourist things – a day at the Louvre, a walk through Montmartre and a visit to the Sacré Cœur, the Eiffel Tower all lit up at night, the Arc de Triomphe while some old Resistance soldiers celebrated something, the Notre Dame in the rain, the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain des Pres. We strolled through two of the Big Three cemeteries of Paris – Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse, and stood in solemn reflection of the contributions to humanity of such luminaries as Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire, Wilde, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Moliere … and Jim Morrison. We left our Metro tickets at Serge Gainsbourg’s grave and searched in vain for the last resting place of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His hiding away in an unmarked tomb seems either a deep philosophical statement or a final trick to play on an evil, materialistic world.

Nights included a house party almost at the Périphérique, dinner and drinks and movies in places where famous people once hung out, and one day and night preparing food and catering for three hundred petit-bourgeois Parisiens. Thanks Shimon for that opportunity.

The week spent in Paris was a great opportunity to practice my faltering French, as I was the only one in our tour group of four that spoke any of the lingua franca. Unfortunately, for the most part, it didn’t get much more detailed than ‘comment est-ce que je peux aller à …’ or ‘trois cafés et un café au lait , s’il vous plait’. But just hearing that accent, understanding some of what was going on and being able to read signposts encouraged me to aim for fluency by the end of the year, no matter where it is that I end up in the next couple of months.

I got the feeling - as inexplicable as it is - that I would be back here soon enough, that I would be an expat in the city and as such had no reason to be embarrassed or ashamed of my tourist label. Ah, it was all just appearances anyway.

Kara brought me to an excellent English language bookshop just across from the Île de la Cité where we could have browsed for hours, except my parents were unimpressed by the extensive range of reading material and waited impatiently outside. We quickly purchased Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, which is most appropriate, considering our lack of funds and plans to travel to London in the next couple of weeks.

The time in Paris would not have been as enjoyable or as financially viable without my friend Pippa generously offering her bedroom over to two weary travelers, so if you read this blog by any chance, merci beaucoup mademoiselle Druce et j’espere te revoir encore bientôt.

Another new link
Voices from the Bethlehem ghetto

Fences and Walls

Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem


The Wall dwarfs humans and cars


What do you think of this?

Yet another tedious update

Added some more links in the sidebar. My mate Hammy is getting a project underway called the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice, and yes it is spelt CENTRE not CENTER as everyone else seems to be doing it these days. It certainly sounds important, and has a kewl looking logo, as designed by Stu, bringing me to the design link of the week. Stu's site is very slick, and he is a great guy to have a beer with. Then I was reading the comments section on Hammy's blog and find this guy called Mad Hatter making funny comments and decide he deserves a link in the blog section. His output is called Tramspotting. That's all with the housekeeping.

Now on to the debates I have been reading.

"Media is the devil, it's old, unwielding, tied to the money making class and its interests, fails to deliver any sort of betterment to society, etc, etc ad infinitum." So what? Read it with the university education you all have and dissect it, extract what you need from it and leave the rest to keep your chips warm. Or write a research paper. Don't whine about it. It is not endearing.

Porn. So some people enjoy porn and some people don't. Do the people that like it have the right to force those that don't to watch it? Of course not. But do the people that find it abhorrent have the right to impose their view? Why, of course. Moral superiority (real or imagined) has been the justification for actrocities performed throughout history. Need I list examples? Give up on the value-laden shit and allow people to decide for themselves what is right and wrong. If, as a society, we decide to punish people for acting a certain way, don't tell them they are wrong, just say, hey, there's more of us and this is what we are going to do. I'm sure you think you are right, so go be right in our prison.

The main issue is that we are finding a symptom and calling it a disease.

I feel incoherence washing over me, and I am reminded why I have been so quiet. Me out.

It's amazing what spending half an hour a day reading the blogs of friends can do for an expat's sense of alienation. The effect can go either way - a further feeling of isolation or a sense that no matter what oceans stand in our way a quickly typed, badly spelled message can engander togetherness, familiarity and love.

I don't always write so much anymore, my bad, and I'm not sure why. I check and read blog after blog after blog to see what is new in the world I once inhabited, but usually fail to add to the debate. So I guess all I'm trying to say is that even though I have stopped yelling from rooftops, I am still listening quietly from the shadows, and will occasionally pop up with witty, knowing comments.

And here is an article that would make you laugh if it wasn't so sad.

News just in

In a development that is sure to shock the entire community affiliated with this modest blog, Ali is no longer with fingernail.

After months of cultivating his right pinky finger, a freak accident with a filing cabinet brought the entire project to nothing.

A shocked Ali said "I just wanted to see the look on my parents faces when they saw my 3cm (roughly one inch) fingernail. Plus, it was really useful".

He was said to be tiring of people asking him "what it all meant" but authorities have ruled out sabotage. A source close to Ali, Ms Riley said "all evidence points to the nail having been disattached in a office accident. I don't believe this is a cry for attention".
Plans are being made for future regeneration.

Sources: AFP, AP, Reuters

Wanna see a collection of images from Egypt? Then boogie on down to CNN Photography. Hover over each image for a brief description.

I've found some really interesting sites in the last couple o' months, some of which I will dispense now...

Rafah Pundits - a group blog based in Rafah, Gaza that discusses most all issues associated with Israel - Palestine. I am now an occasional contributor.

Orthodox Anarchist is an American Jew who is living in al-Quds for a year, studying the Torah and DJing in secret destinations. He also runs Jew School which has an interesting 'Apartheid or Not Apartheid ' debate going on at the mo'.

Avant-garde Hebrew / international hip hop what you looking for? AMN is the place to find it.

Do you enjoy watching Fox News just to see how mad you can get? Then head over to Little Green Footballs for a bit of Israeli-American co-production fun.

Or a more reasonable blog...Head Heeb

And finally, a good friend of mine who is currently working for a prisoner rights group in Ramallah has set up a photo-essay of his travels in Palestine.

Oft times I find myself really struggling to post on my other blog. It is not that I have nothing to say, nor the words to say it. I have a dilemma of identification.

What I see here, what I hear and read in the newspapers, what I experience, it all affects me. Sometimes it makes me angry, sometimes it makes me determined to make sense of it, and sometimes I give up hope completely. I am trying to compile a series of stories that paint a clear picture of the issues that inform the ‘Palestinian debate’. I want to be professional, balanced, level-headed and objective. I do not want to fall into the trap of false equivalence, merely repeating the facts of this incursion and this act of resistance as though each were an equal part of the problem. But on the flip side, I have no intention of appearing as a partisan activist, ignoring one fact to highlight the injustice of another. So, for the most part, I have been relatively silent.

People that live far away from Israel-Palestine have opinions about this conflict, this is fact. And, for educated people, these opinions are formed on the basis of news reports, analyses and varied sources of opinion. But is there a clear sense of what is going on? I really doubt it.

I am not in the West Bank or Gaza, nor is my work directly related to the Occupied / Disputed Territories. But this is where the flashpoints are, this is where ‘news’ occurs.

I read reports from al-Jazeera, the New York Times, The Age, Washington Post, Guardian, ABC, the Christian Science Monitor, etc, etc. In each one I feel the coverage is dressed up to suit the intended audience. For al-Jazeera’s predominantly Arab audience every Palestinian action is resistance, every Israeli action is incitement. Rarely is their mention of Arab governments’ failure to broker any sort of just agreement. The Guardian writes for left-leaning intellectuals, those that will scoff at Tony Blair’s initiatives and tut-tut Israel's disregrd of international law. Every piece of media has its own master.

I also read my fair share of blogs, some pro-Palestinian, some pro-Israeli, and the primary characteristic of all is their absolute belief in the justice of the cause they support. For the pro-Israelites suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are abhorrent, without reason or context. It follows that a society that condones this type of violence (and of course the Palestinian society and its supporters condone such attacks) are deserving of anything a national army metes out. For the pro-Palestinian accounts IDF incursions and Israeli policy of ignoring, undermining and emasculating the Palestinian leadership while continuing a process of colonizing their lands is reason enough to support the underdog.

It is hard work trying to decipher every agenda before reading anything. I guess all this is approximating a ‘crisis of faith’. I am losing faith in the idea of an agenda-free media. Which makes me wonder, if every one must take a side, where do I stand?

Anyway, thanks for listening. I’m glad I could tell someone without further damaging my blossoming career in journalism.

Sometimes it's not easy to be cheery
When your living room gets flooded every time it rains. When it rains more often than you would expect, and it is cold and windy besides. When your shower won't get hot, or cuts out if you have the audacity to also have the heater on in the bedroom. Sometimes it's not easy to be cheery. When you return home to discover someone has been there and helped themselves to your things. When you can no longer trust your neighbours. When you catch a bus and are surrounding by boys and girls in green, carrying guns and smoking, chatting, talking on mobile phones and not paying for the bus ticket which you pay too much for. Sometimes it's not easy to be cheery. When you go to work and every day learn just how stuck this society is, how stubbornly it sticks to the narrative, how impossible the hope for a resolution is, when you examine power structures and conclude that the status quo is just fine for the masters, and you still listen to their bleating. When you read continuously the xenophobia that equates Palestinian resistance with Saddamism and insurgency and al-Qaeda terrorism and suddenly everyone is a barbarian except the noble protectors that share my bus. Sometimes it's not easy to be cheery.

Thanks guys...for the support, the love, the hugs...and the inflatable, three-quarter size blowup doll of Yasser Arafat. I wouldn't get through the long, cold nights without it.

And sorry that I've been so caught up in occupation politics, discriminatory land policies, children dying unnecessarily, people being arrested, checkpoints being erected, my bags being detected and other stories selected.

More adventures on acid, more scaling of the Pyramids naked and more of all the other good things that make life worth living will be beamed direct to you, my loyal audience. Bukra.