morning oatmeal (live from egypt)

We eat packaged oatmeal this morning, gooey globs landing on bellies.  Elbows attracting sticky oatmeal straggles off the table.  The shirts come off and still they ingest the hearty meal.  

I am over at the computer already wanting to see and hear Obama speak with resoluteness on all that is problematic in the Middle East.  His advisers have cautioned us that there is only so much that can be accomplished by a speech, by a trip, by one administration.  But the speech as I begin to take it in sounds different.  I believe in sound, it is not just hot air floating up, some of this is quite cold actually.  The Israelis are already annoyed that US policy seems to be changing, as we insist on no new settlement growth.  

In this speech Obama made clear that the Palestinians are a displaced people, that they have existed in an occupied state for 60 years.  There is squirming in Israel today.  It feels like an actual change .

I’m going to read A Peace to End All Peace this week, and try to gain more understanding of when and how and why.

Question: How do we participate in the soft power process of knowing one another as people and not stereotypes?

emergency evacuation (west bank burning)

The fire alarm’s calm masculine voice issued directives that tell my sleep-addled brain to get out now.  We are hotel-side, the kids and I, and six floors up, a quick elevator-ride.  But now the voice says we must use the stairs, the two year old, the six year old and me.  I hoist Bean onto my hip, and guide Z to the door, turning around to grab my purse up off the floor, hoping it has my car key and my room key, wishing once more that I possessed the virtue of Order.  I see my sports bra and push it down into the depths of my bag, in case.  I forget shoes and blankets.  Z begins to cry as we open the door to the stairs and the fluorescent lights and white walls feel aggressive after the dim tranquillity of hotel passages.  They seem not to hear the blaring alarm, not to notice the other people quickly abandoning possessions and sleep.  And I am just grateful that she keeps moving.  A woman offers to carry her, but none of the men seem concerned with my burden.  They all have shoes on, jackets in hand.  

When they call us back in from the car, there is no line at the desk.  Apparently everyone else found their room keys as they exited.  

Last night I settled the wee ones back into bed, lulled myself to sleep with the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs, and woke with relatively little panic.  

Curious George plays in the background now as I sift through the morning news of disappearing planes flying west to an airport where my husband sits waiting to fly east and home, and of anger in the West Bank, riots and tires burning and more people being displaced from a land they call home.  

I understand so little about the situation that is Israel/Palestine.  I can name two dates that seem important: 1949, 1973.  I can name a few people whom I have met who claim this land as their own, people with passports from Israel and Lebanon, people whose addresses are in Bethlehem and Gaza and Jerusalem.  I can understand how it might feel to lose one’s home, but not to lose my homeland.  

What I am trying to understand today is what Obama’s insistence on no new settlements/no new settlement expansion really means for the Israelis and for the Palestinians, what it means for us to ask for this.  I know just as I begin to grasp it there will be something new, already today’s conflict between Hamas and Fatah is taking precedence in the news.  And beyond that I know only that Jon and Kate plus 8 will be on tonight (not that I’m watching.)  That is literally a headline in a paper I hold in esteem…