Failed on June 5th

Today, as I was working my derrière off trying to accomplish a progress report which the upper management suddenly entrusted me with the task of writing, I was desperately watching time ticking at 11:00 AM, the time I had set for myself to leave office to join the June 5th movement in order to "reclaim my dignity as a Palestinian". My empty bag of food was intentionally not filled today since I woke up with the assumption that I was to be part of something major. Suddenly, this new culture of "jobs" in Palestine dawned upon me and started making perfect sense. This culture that is erasing everything "Palestinian" as we once knew it, this culture that is brought upon us from the seed that was Oslo, and the many defeats which we allowed for to be part of us by accepting having our leaders shamelessly commit.

The time was still ticking around 2:00 PM when I realized that there was no way out for me before finishing that cursed report. Sirens were being fired near Qalandia checkpoint, I checked to see the news assuming there would be thousands of Palestinians who had the power that I lacked to come out "with bare chests" facing Israel's "bullets of fear", there were only few.

The culture of "watha'ef"-jobs as my dear friend Tareq puts it, has consumed us to the bones. I could not leave behind a simple report for a greater cause, yet someone else could not leave a simple proposal, a 2-hour training, an-all-day work shop, a meeting with a client, a potential buyer, a lecture, a lap-dance, an abusive boss, a demanding manager, a running from one hookah to the other with the little fire-tray, a kitchen at a run-down restaurant, a butcher's shop. We all could not leave because this culture of "watha'ef" has eaten us up to the marrow. Suddenly we lost our ability to weigh what should matter to us. For example, I spent an entire day writing a bi-monthly report that was probably not worth the time I spent writing it. I probably should have made it clear to the management at the office that the report should not be due today, on June 5th, on the date set to liberate Jerusalem, but I was probably ashamed and I did it anyways.

As I watched time clicking, an over-worked angry coworker was banging papers and tables for "messing up yet again", his breath and pointless comments about work irked me, his dying to comply with the norm, his dying to get married, his dying to "excel" at what he does, his perfectionist attitude and limited social manners, they irked my every inch.

As time was clicking and people were dying, I was once again complying with the new Palestinian norm: the culture that is Ramallah and the economy of the wages, where Jerusalem is worth a progress report at my job, or a day-worth of slaughtered animals at a butcher's shop, or an ember being carried by a young Palestinian coffeeshop worker to light the hookah of a jobless loser with memories of the first intifada.

I cannot think of a better way to end this ranting except watching the letters of shame filling a white screen. A friend on Facebook suggested finding new methods for resistance. To him I say: how about we resist the temptations of our daily norms and of NGOs we desperately seek employment with? How about we realize that with this money being poured over Palestine there are new souls being signed off in new contracts to the new economical order being implemented in Palestine (Where an olive tree becomes a sheer symbol, and Palestinians display their inherited affection to Palestine with mere pictures nailed to the walls at their jobs, from Arafat to Handala). (Where a shrine in Ramallah, near Ramallah's dumping field, inside a park that is the size of a football field is supposed to make Mahmoud Darwish gladly accept replacing el-Birweh (near Akka on the Mediterranean) because this fabulous park/shrine was named after his beloved el-Birweh.

I stand here in silence (and in shame) fully acknowledging the truth that I am part of this new order that is entangling Palestine and suffocating the freedom we sought for so long. If anyone will have to liberate Palestine it is not going to be me. Our long awaited liberator will be someone who still has not yet bought into the culture of the absurd and conventional. It will have to be someone not yet cursed by this neo-Palestinian order, someone who does not care about writing a progress report nor finishing preparing a meal to an over stuffed client at an over-priced restaurant in Ramallah. It will have to be someone who calls the name of Palestine in their prayers; not someone who thinks of her as calling-minutes with a new cellphone provider. Someone who sees her true colors through what is left from the pre-1948 photographs, not someone who thinks of her as a new job opportunity serving a foreign-aid-agency-with-a-purpose. It will have to be someone who still thinks that Palestine is a piece from heaven and sees it vividly shining with soil, not as a tower of cement and dust at an outrageously priced lot that once held a little cottage and a pine tree.