Reprinted: Israeli Propaganda Isn’t Fooling Anyone – Except Israelis

Haaretz
Gideon Levy
June 4, 2015

And propaganda shall cover for everything. We’ll say terrorism, we’ll shout anti-Semitism, we’ll scream delegitimation, we’ll cite the Holocaust; we’ll say Jewish state, gay-friendly, drip irrigation, cherry tomatoes, aid to Nepal, Nobel Prizes for Jews, look what’s happening in Syria, the only democracy, the greatest army. We’ll say the Palestinians are making unilateral moves, we’ll propose negotiations on the “settlement bloc borders,” we’ll demand recognition of a Jewish state and we’ll complain that “there’s no one to talk to.”

We’ll wail that the whole world is against us and wants to destroy us, no less. The deputy minister will call on Switzerland to boycott, the minister will declare that boycotts are unacceptable, the deputy director of the Foreign Ministry will explain that a bigger budget is needed, and Sheldon Adelson will convene an emergency conference in Las Vegas – and despite it all, nothing will budge. Propaganda won’t cover for everything.

The policy of denial and disconnection from reality is rising to a dangerous level, and the illness is getting worse. When the world starts to show encouraging signs of stirring to action, Israel further entrenches itself in its imaginary reality and erects more and more separation barriers for itself. Israel seems to think that what worked well in its society and succeeded in almost totally wiping out all consciousness and awareness, will work just as well in the rest of the world. That the brainwashing campaign that was such a dazzling success here will be just as effective abroad – it’s all just a matter of “hasbara,” the Israeli euphemism for propaganda – and of budgets, of course.

Just give them enough funding and hasbara tools and they’ll explain to the world how wrong it is and how right the state of the Jews, who have no other country. A convention in Las Vegas, some brainstorming in Jerusalem, and the world will change its attitude.

It’s only to be expected when facing a worldwide campaign aimed at implementing justice and international law: the stage of denial, of repression and clinging to the false, nearly magical belief that if Israel will just explain its position better and invest the appropriate resources, everything will be fine. In other words, Israel continues to think that the world is dumb (and Israel is smart). That you can sell the world anything, just as you can sell anything to Israelis. That Adelson will buy the world’s sympathy the way he buys politicians in America, and the deputy ambassador in Dublin will show those Irish anti-Semites what’s what.

It’s self-deception, of course, and it’s also part of the campaign of propaganda and lies. There are some things, said the late ambassador Yohanan Meroz, that are not “hasbarable.” One of them is Israel’s actions. No explainer or propagandist can explain the perpetuation of the occupation. It just won’t work.

Granted, in a country full of propagandists, it has been working for close to 50 years already; most Israelis are convinced that all is really fine with us; that the IDF is really moral and the occupation is really an occupation of no choice; that Israel can live by the sword forever and be dismissive of the whole world, that it can tyrannize the Palestinians, wreck Gaza every other year, shoot children and believe that justice is on its side and that the world will see this too. That propaganda can replace any other policy.

That you can fool the whole world all the time. You can come up with all sorts of new (and strange) conditions every two or three years for ending the occupation and insisting that the spit we’re feeling is just raindrops. You can blame the Palestinians for everything and obscure the simple fact that this brutal occupation is Israeli. You can tell the world that it all belongs to us because the Bible says so and believe that anyone will take you seriously. You can be sure that the memory of the Holocaust will serve us forever, and justify any injustice.

Of course, it won’t work indefinitely. It hasn’t worked in any country in history, no matter how strong and well-established, not even in the mightiest empires. Justice always triumphs in the end, even if very belatedly. And justice says that Israel cannot continue to tyrannize another people forever, even if Haim Saban himself lends his support.

Reprinted: I Am Gaza City’s Mayor. Our Lives and Culture Are in Rubble.

New York Times
Yahya R. Sarraj
December 24, 2023

As a teenager in the 1980s, I watched the construction of the intricately designed Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza City, named after one of Gaza’s greatest public figures, and its theater, grand hall, public library, printing press and cultural salon.

Students and researchers, scholars and artists from across the Gaza Strip came to visit it, and so did President Bill Clinton in 1998. The center was the gem of Gaza City. Watching it being built inspired me to become an engineer, which led to a career as a professor and, in the footsteps of al-Shawa, as mayor of Gaza City.

Now that gem is rubble. It was destroyed by Israeli bombardment.

The Israeli invasion has caused the deaths of more than 20,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and destroyed or damaged about half the buildings in the territory. The Israelis have also pulverized something else: Gaza City’s cultural riches and municipal institutions.

The unrelenting destruction of Gaza — its iconic symbols, its beautiful seafront, its libraries and archives and whatever economic prosperity it had — has broken my heart.

The Gaza Zoo has been destroyed, with many of its animals killed or starved to death, including wolves, hyenas, birds and rare foxes. Other casualties include the city’s main public library, the Children’s Happiness Center, the municipal building and its archive, and the seventh-century Great Omari Mosque. Israeli forces have also damaged or destroyed streets, squares, mosques, churches and parks.

One of my major goals after the Hamas administration appointed me mayor in 2019 was to improve the city’s seafront and foster the opening of small businesses along it to create jobs. It took us four years to finish the project, which included a promenade, recreation areas and spaces for those businesses. It took Israel only weeks to destroy it. Niveen, a divorced woman I know, was supposed to open a small restaurant in November but her dream is gone. Mohammed, a disabled Palestinian, lost his small cafe.

Why did the Israeli tanks destroy so many trees, electricity poles, cars and water mains? Why would Israel hit a U.N. school? The obliteration of our way of life in Gaza is indescribable. I still feel I am in a nightmare because I can’t imagine how any sane person could engage in such a horrific campaign of destruction and death.

The modern municipality of Gaza was established in 1893 and is one of the oldest in the Middle East. It served about 800,000 people, among the largest congregations of Palestinians in the world. Even after Israel forcibly displaced more than one million Palestinians from northern Gaza after the war began, much of the population in the city remained.

When Israel began its war on Gaza in response to the deadly attack by Hamas, I was abroad. I cut my tour short to return to help our people. I head an emergency committee of municipal workers and volunteers, who have been trying to fix water pipes, open roads and clear disease-causing sewage and garbage. At least 14 members of our municipal staff have died. Almost everyone on the committee has lost a home or relative.

I, too, have lost a loved one. Without warning, a direct hit to my house on Oct. 22 killed my eldest son, Roshdi, a photojournalist and filmmaker. He thought he thought he would be safer at his parents’ home. It made me wonder if I could have been the target. We will never know. I buried Roshdi and quickly returned to work with the emergency committee.

Israel, which began its blockade of Gaza more than 16 years ago and has maintained what the United Nations and human rights groups call an ongoing occupation for far longer, is destroying life here. An unnamed Israeli defense official promised to turn Gaza into a city of tents and Israel has forcibly displaced its inhabitants. For once, Israel is keeping a promise its officials made to the Palestinians.

I call on the world’s municipalities — everyone — to pressure world leaders to stop this mindless destruction.

Why can’t Palestinians be treated equally, like Israelis and all other peoples in the world? Why can’t we live in peace and have open borders and free trade? Palestinians deserve to be free and have self-determination. Gaza’s emblem is the phoenix, which rises from the ashes. It insists on life.

Yahya R. Sarraj is the mayor of Gaza City and a former rector of the University College of Applied Sciences there.

Important Article by Israeli Human Rights Leader

Hagai El-Ad is a Jewish Israeli Human Rights and LGBTQ Rights advocate. He has directed the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance, The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and until recently B’Tselem בצלם, one of the foremost NGOs documenting human rights abuses in the West Bank.

His recent column in Haaretz, reprinted below, is nuanced in its treatment of history and its engagement of the post-colonial paradigm. It is anguished and heartfelt, intelligent and important. It doesn’t come to conclusions, but it also doesn’t look away from difficult truths. It assumes humanity on both sides.

The old paradigms are dead. This is a starting point for finding a new way forward. Israelis have a much farther way to go to accept even a real and dignified two-state solution based on international law and respecting the rights of Palestinian refugees (somehow — exactly how should be a point of negotiation). The entire Arab world already offered this in 2002. Israel ignored it. They even more strongly oppose a one-state solution where everyone has equal rights. They are terrified that if they give Palestinians real human rights and freedoms, Palestinians will only get stronger and keep attacking Israel.

But it’s exactly the opposite: As long as Palestinians have no way forward to live their lives in dignity with basic human rights, their resistance will only get stronger and the bloodshed may never end.

Netanyahu is currently committing something akin to the Bosnian genocide, because he doesn’t want a Palestinian state or Palestinians to have the right to vote in Israel, so the only solution is to kill or drive out the Palestinians. First Gaza, then, when a pretext presents itself, the West Bank.

I’m genuinely shocked by how much the world has let him get away with already. Allowing this to continue any further means risking a spiral into depths of hell most people still can’t imagine, possibly all the way to world war.

.

‘Decolonization’ of Israel or ‘Decisive Defeat’ of Palestinians: Are These Our Only Options?

Hagai El-Ad
Haaretz
December 15, 2023

The political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that “[t]he settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea.” On the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, Zionist settlers tried very hard to ensure that if footprints were to be left in the sand, it would be of their feet only. Tried and succeeded: After the Nakba, only one Palestinian village remained on the coast, Jisr al-Zarqa. Before 1948, it was possible to walk from Jisr, perhaps in bare feet, a short distance north to al-Tantura, or south to Qisarya. These Palestinian villages, as well as the rest of those on the coast, were destroyed and the large Palestinian coastal cities were emptied – from Acre and Haifa in the north, through Jaffa in the center to Majdal (now Ashkelon) in the south: Majdal, whose last Palestinian inhabitants were deported to Gaza only toward the end of 1950, when the war was long over. Or perhaps, it never was.

Today, one walking north along the coast from Jisr will have to make his way out of Israel/Palestine, through the blocked railway tunnels and the blown-up bridge between them at Rosh Hanikra/Ras al-Naqoura, and continue for about 20 kilometers toward the southern edges of Tyre, in Lebanon, to reach the first Palestinian coastal footprint: the Rashidieh refugee camp. And heading south? He will have to make his way into the Gaza Strip, of course – reaching the northern outskirts of the city of Gaza and the Al-Shati refugee camp: Shati, literally the “beach” camp, whose name indicates not only its location on the Mediterranean coast, but perhaps also bears the memory of lost beaches, those that no longer have villages (except one) and cities by their side, but rather refugee camps, the places where Palestinians will surely “die anywhere, from anything” (Fanon).

Battle tanks, and not only feet, can also leave marks in the sand. Israel captured Rashidieh in the 1982 Lebanon War (in Operation Litani in 1978, the camp was encircled) and occupied it until 1985. Whereas Shati, like the rest of the Gaza Strip, was under direct Israeli occupation from 1967 until the 2005 disengagement, and then went through repeated “rounds” of military operations – and one continuous blockade – all the way until the horrific October of 2023 when the army returned to Shati, as it did to almost the entire northern half of the Strip. What is now left of the camp? In mid-November, Haaretz reported that “[w]hen the APC stops, the hatch opens onto the Shati refugee camp. A look around reveals something that was once a street… After a short journey west, we once again have a view of the Gaza coastline. Its beauty is in stark contrast to the destruction along the entire length of the shore.” At a distance of about 120 kilometers, Shati is no longer the first Palestinian community on the coast south of Jisr a-Zarqa. Truth be told, it is not clear when – if at all – it will be again.

In this manner we “replaced” – in Fanon’s words – “a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.” History shows that when people are “replaced” by others – when colonization is carried out – atrocities are committed. This is not some theoretical, distant insight: In 1948, during that “replacement,” we committed atrocities: from Deir Yassin (after the replacement: Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood) to Tantura (after the replacement: Moshav Dor and Kibbutz Nahsholim). And as decolonization is “quite simply” the reversal of the above, quite a few people – disgustingly – hold the opinion that the massacres, rape and other horrors of October 7 expressed such a moment of “decolonization” – and therefore are, essentially, justified.

I suppose that it is possible to accept – resignedly or resentfully – a historical fate that embraces a worldview that between the River and the Sea everything, absolutely everything, is a zero-sum game. And that forever it will be exactly so, and if not forever then until – until when exactly? Until the “decolonization” of the Jews, or until the “decisive defeat” of the Palestinians? Either possibility entails a superficial – and cruel – reading of history.

Yes, it is good to read Fanon, hear the echo of his ideas, recognize them in our local context – and to recognize, with a measure less of automatic superficiality, the differences: Palestine is not Algeria, and we are not (speaking of feet) pieds-noirs; “Who can dispute the rights of the Jews to Palestine?” (as Jerusalem Mayor Yousef al-Khalidi wrote in 1899, in a letter delivered to Herzl); Jews came here while “leaning on the British Mandate” (Jabotinsky) but we also came here as refugees while fighting the Mandate; and, above all: No other home awaits us anywhere else in the world. Jews have been walking here, sometimes barefoot, for many a generation. On this land, the seashore is not the only place where our feet are visible.

Of course, not only our feet. Decisive defeat? Operation Yoav (October 1948) resulted, in a short period of time, in the emptying of the southern coastal plain (and the northern Negev/Naqab) of Palestinians, thus doubling the population of the Gaza Strip and transforming it into a place where most people, to this very day, are refugees or their descendants.

Seventy-five years later, and the current Israeli military operation is already emptying another parcel of land of Palestinians: this time, the northern half of the Strip, while doubling the population of the southern half – and who knows if, when and to exactly where Israel will allow them to return. Indeed, it is possible to continue all this. To “fold” even more Palestinians into even less territory – not only in Gaza but everywhere: also in the West Bank and the Galilee, in Jerusalem and in the Negev. To kill even more Palestinians: In 2014 we killed hundreds of children in Gaza, now they number in the thousands. Continue to carry the “violence into the home and into the mind” of Palestinians, and to remind them (and ourselves) again and again, “that the great showdown cannot be put off indefinitely” (Fanon). All this is possible.

And indeed, the current Israeli war plan – as announced almost daily – is, definitely, to continue until “the elimination of Hamas” is completed. With respect to this plan there are those who remind us that Hamas is a Palestinian movement – an idea – and that ideas cannot be destroyed. This is, of course, true, but – and the same people often neglect to mention the following – this insight applies not only to certain ideas that are nationalist or violent, but to ideas in general. Humanistic ideas too cannot be destroyed, even if human beings who hold them as a worldview are killed.

These are dark days for millions of people. Here we are, over 15 million of us, reeling within an unending horror of death and violence. Not a single day goes by without tears. Humanistic ideas may perhaps be indestructible, but are they even relevant in such a reality? Truthfully, they are more relevant than ever – not as a means of indulging in some naive moralism, but because they genuinely express a different moral perspective, desiring of life, at the heart of which is also a measure of sober realism that was formulated as early as 1948, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected.”

Anyone with eyes in his head knew that reality was heading, God forbid, toward a terrible implosion. This is how B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization that I directed until about six months ago, put it in 2017: “The situation wrongly called the status quo ensures one thing, and one thing only: a continued downward spiral into an ever more violent, unjust and hopeless reality. Unless a nonviolent way out of the present situation is found, the violence of the past half century might be just a preview of much worse to come. The effort to achieve a different future here is not only an urgent moral imperative, it is a matter of life and death.”

B’Tselem repeated these words over and over again, also in May 2021 (during Operation Guardian of the Walls): “A reality that is based on organized violence is not only immoral – it is a danger to us all… We all desire life. For every single one of us.”

And no, within this realistic perspective, there is no justification for the atrocities of October 7. Yes, it is possible to engineer a reality rooted in dispossession and oppression, of a regime based on supremacy and violence, and pretend that none of this leads to an implosion – and even blame those who warned of the inevitable outcome as if they were justifying the violence. But this is hypocritical: Warning against the impending abyss is not a priori apologism for the expected crash. Rather, it is an attempt, perhaps a desperate one, to prevent it.

Humans can make choices. Therefore, we have moral responsibility. The Israelis bear responsibility for (among other things) the consequences of the long-standing policy that made it clear to Palestinians that Israel had no intention of granting them freedom or equality, a policy that sought to trample any nonviolent channel through which Palestinians tried to resist their dispossession. Israel is the one that decided that everything – except Palestinian surrender – is “terrorism.”

Demonstrations? Popular terrorism. The ICC in The Hague? Legal terrorism. The United Nations? Diplomatic terrorism. Sanctions? Economic terrorism.

This is a continuous, arrogant, immoral and irresponsible approach, which made it clear every day anew that any attempt at nonviolent resistance was prohibited, and that Israel would act against it by force. The completely predictable outcome of all this was, and continues to be, more violence.

And even though the violent implosion was the ever-approaching abyss that was visible to all, there is a terrible and unequivocal responsibility that is shared by anyone who decided to step beyond the abyss’ threshold. This is the Palestinian responsibility (among other things) for torching homes with their occupants still inside, murdering children, raping women*, kidnapping families and all the other atrocities of October 7 and since that terrible day. Against such crimes there has always been and will forever be an absolute moral prohibition. The shock, the rage, the unending terrible sadness and the tears that never stop, are the human response to the trampling of the most basic norms. The shock is even more painful when there are those who try to deny the bloody facts, or when there are those who are unable to say simply that this is an atrocity, that this is a crime, that these are absolute prohibitions that have been violated time and again in Be’eri’s safe rooms, on the lawns of Kfar Azza, between the houses of Nir Oz, in the fields of Re’im and the streets of Sderot and Ofakim.

[* Pamela’s note: It is emerging that at least some of the allegations of rape were false, and there remains no concrete evidence of any rape committed. This is not a question of “believing women,” because no victims have come forward and made allegations. It is a question of believing Israeli spokespeople, soldiers, and volunteers who lied about several things, including forty beheaded babies, dead children hung on clotheslines, and a pregnant women with her fetus cut out of her body. There is no evidence any of those things happened, though they were repeated widely in the press for weeks. To be clear, Hamas did commit mass murder and abductions, both of which are terrible crimes. And it is possible that rapes were committed. I am waiting for more comprehensive reports and evidence to come out before making a determination. Please feel welcome to share any evidence in the comments. While we must be sensitive when it comes to allegations of sexual assault, and generally speaking I do err on the side of believing victims, it’s also important to remember that false allegations of rape against marginalized people have been used to justify atrocities, such as lynchings in the American South. And Israel is currently committing something akin to the Bosnian genocide in Gaza. The atrocities in Gaza are so horrific, it would be difficult for ordinary people to stomach them without thoroughly dehumanizing the Palestinians and whipping up blinding fury. False allegations of monstrous atrocities are one way to do this.]

The Israeli paradigm, for years now, has been to control the entire area while managing most Palestinians by way of two subcontractors: the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. There have long been those who have said that since the establishment of the Oslo regime in the territories, Fatah, the “Movement for the Liberation of Palestine,” may still be a movement but that it is certainly no longer doing much liberation. Therefore, the best thing it can do is to rebel against the paradigm and “return the keys” to Israel. At the end of the day, it was actually the other subcontractor, Hamas, which upended the paradigm. As Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’ politburo, told The New York Times, the group’s “goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such… It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”

Yes, the old paradigm was rotten to the core. Whoever kicked it did so with appalling cruelty. The price paid in blood is skyrocketing. And now we all live in a post-October 7 world. In Israel it is still not possible to identify all the bodies. In Gaza it is impossible to count all the bodies. Throughout all my years in B’Tselem, I kept in my heart the fear of the day when the horror would overflow, and the so-called conflict would transform into a phase so violent that not all victims could have a name or a grave. We have reached this stage. We live this horror. Deir Yassin and Gush Etzion, Sabra and Shatila, Be’eri and Gaza. Atrocities etched into the historical memory of both peoples. Leaders who speak in real time about the “destruction of Israel” and of the “2023 Gaza Nakba.” How much blood can this Earth absorb before it vomits us all out?

We all desire life. For every single one of us.

On Ethical Palestinian Resistance

This is an article by Peter Beinart, a Jewish South African who is a prominent US commentator and professor of journalism at CUNY. I think it’s too important to hide behind a paywall.

There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.

The New York Times
Peter Beinart
October 14, 2023

In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”

Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.

There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.

Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.

In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.

The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.

As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never set foot in it.

Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.

Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north.

The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.

It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.

And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”

Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is affiliated with more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.

The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.

Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.

The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.

That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.

The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.

Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.

The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.

After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”

As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.

Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”

Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.

Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.

Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.

From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.

Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.

Our son, Ali Julian

So much has happened since I posted last! Our biggest news is that we had a son on April 9, 2018, after five long years. Below are some of my favorite pictures and memories from the first five months of his sweet life.

Here are some of the latest:

He’s learning to crawl now — and he’s so close!

Backing up a bit. My favorites from his first month:

 

Favorites from Month 2:

 

Month 3 — his palm has a little heart on it:

 

Month 4 (with a special guest star in his “4 Months” photo, a little girl named Allie whom I was watching at the time):

 

Month 5:

 

Life is good ❤

UPDATE (November 12): Our little man is 7 months now, crawling everywhere, cruising, babbling, eating ANYTHING we put in front of him, and generally so sweet and wonderful we can hardly believe how the stars blessed us. Here are some more recent favorite pics:

I’m also fundraising for Rania and her family one last time. You can read more about their situation and donate here, or feel free to Paypal money to pamolson02@yahoo.com

Or contact me about how to mail a check or send money directly to her via Western Union.

Thanks so much! ❤

 

Our Life in 2015-16

Dear friends,

Apologies for not being in touch for a while. I’ve been focusing on finishing a novel and dealing with a personal issue that’s taken up a lot of bandwidth. I’m also still working on my novel, Sinai Moon. The book has made me laugh and helped me through some tough times, and I hope it will do the same for others.

Last time I wrote was just before my book tour through Scotland, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Turkey in the spring of 2015. It was exhausting but awesome. Highlights include a lively interview with the BBC in Scotland and a live interview on Turkish TV with a presenter who didn’t really speak English (luckily he prepped me ahead of time on what the questions would be).

And a lavish event at the La Fontaine Centre for Contemporary Art & Spa (& Restaurant) in Bahrain. The venue is a massive restored 19th century mansion with atmospheric interiors and romantic courtyards with elegant art installations and a gargantuan fountain (perfect for discussing dangerous politics, as no one could overhear you above the roar).

I don’t think this picture conveys how truly massive that Fontaine is

A band of traditional Bahraini musicians set the mood during the event, and I gave a book talk and Palestine presentation to a large audience under the stars. (I was surprised how many people in the Gulf in general were surprised by what I had to say. The news just can’t show how beautiful it is or how bad things really are.) Afterwards I found the band having dinner in one of the courtyards, and we talked into the late hours.

The band

In May of this year Ahmed and I did a 6000-mile road trip to the Grand Canyon, LA, Big Sur, the Bay Area, the Lost Coast, Oregon, Montana, and Yellowstone. Ahmed liked the Grand Canyon best, and I loved watching sea lions play in the mighty current of the Klamath River as it flowed into the Pacific Ocean (and catching up with old friends along the way).

Had to see Hollywood… even though you can’t really see it

McWay Falls in Big Sur

Redwoods

We’re back in Tulsa now, living a few steps from the Arkansas River. We love to walk along it and watch big sunsets over Turkey Mountain as geese and herons fly overhead. Ahmed is doing great with his web design business (referrals welcome!), and I’ve been doing Palestine-related freelance work and a book talk here and there (one is coming up at UMass Amherst). We still play lots of soccer and recently rescued / adopted a wild, sweet grey kitten named Mateo.

On the Palestine front, a teacher from a refugee camp in Bethlehem, Hanan Al Hroub, won the Global Teacher Prize and the million-dollar award that goes with it. She came from modest means, offers special care to children exposed to violence, focuses on providing a safe space of freedom and play in a difficult environment, and is a regular at conferences and teacher training seminars throughout the West Bank.

Remind you of anyone?

Yep — My friend Rania is still doing all that work and more in Tulkarem. She offers desperately-needed counseling for victims of trauma and abuse, activities for children in refugee camps, programs for the disabled (including at a special school for people living with Down syndrome), and training for other counselors and community leaders. The number of lives she touches is truly staggering and humbling.

And she’s still not getting paid a dime for it. We’ve both tried several times to find outside funding, but due to the urgency of Gazans under siege and Syrians fleeing war, aid funds are scarcer than ever, and the Palestinian Authority can barely cover teacher’s salaries and garbage disposal.

So, I’m still raising money each year to pay her a modest salary of $300 a month, which not only helps her family survive but also helps hundreds of vulnerable people in her community. You can view the fundraiser here, with rewards for various levels of contribution and pictures of her work and her beautiful kids:

Help Support Rania’s Social Work in Tulkarem!

Lusan and Karam continue to thrive. Both are at the tops of their classes, and they just get cuter, funnier, and smarter as they get older.

Gifts of $5 or $10 add up very quickly and are more appreciated than we can say. I sent $900 before the fundraiser started, so to support the family for another year, I’ll need to raise $4500.

If you’d rather send a check or use Paypal, let me know which reward(s) you would like and I’ll let you know the best way to pay. My Paypal email is pamolson02@yahoo.com

I pay for all rewards as well as Western Union fees, so 100% of what you give goes to Rania for her work. The generosity of so many people is the only reason Rania has been able to get through some very tough years and become a pillar of her community in a place where Israeli authorities do everything they can to stifle Palestinian life. To me she is the definition of sumoud (steadfastness).

Thank you for anything you can chip in (if you can), and please stay in touch!

Love and light,
Pamela

You can view the fundraising page here.

 

Sinai Moon: Chapter One

PROLOGUE

Something glinted in the corals. My head lifted to see if anyone might be searching for something. The others were kicking along placidly, their snorkels angled from their heads like tiny smokestacks. I took a breath and dove to get a closer look.

My eyes widened as it came more clearly into view. It was caught on a branch of pale yellow coral, its ends swaying faintly in the current. I looked left and right, almost guiltily, before gently lifting it and tucking it into my bikini top.

Back at the surface I held my breath waiting for one of the women to cry out at the realization of her loss. But even after everyone had climbed back onto the tour boat and plastic cups of rum punch were handed out, no one said anything. Finally I cleared my throat.

“Did one of you lose something while you were snorkeling?”

A dozen sunburned faces looked at me, then at each other, and shrugged. A middle-aged man in a Hunter S. Thompson sun hat eyed me shrewdly. “Why, what did you find?”

I hesitated, then shrugged. “I thought I saw something. I guess it was nothing.” The boat operator resumed his patter about Caribbean sea life, and the subject dropped.

A part of me was relieved. The weight of the well-made piece was thrilling against my skin. But I couldn’t just claim it without a good-faith search for the owner, and if she wasn’t on this boat she could be anywhere. Dozens of hotels spewed tourists into the coral gardens off the Turks and Caicos Islands every day.

In my hotel’s cheerful white lobby I asked the concierge, a dapper Cuban, if anyone had lost a piece of jewelry. “No, Señorita Lauren,” he replied, his inflection skating the line between formal and suave. I tried a few more hotels, but the only hit I got was for an engagement ring thrown into the surf after a man got so blind drunk, he accidentally proposed to a passing cocktail waitress instead of to his girlfriend.

Back in my room I wrapped the object in a blue bandana and stuffed it into a pair of socks in my suitcase. Grabbing an oversized towel, I headed for the powder-white sand a few steps from my door to enjoy what was left of my last evening in this fool’s paradise. It was June, the sultry beginning of hurricane season. A friend had mentioned the off-season deal, and I’d jumped on it like a lifeboat. A lifeboat I couldn’t afford, which in any case would take me straight back to the doomed ship in less than thirty-six hours.

I ordered two piña coladas from the shack bar and walked along the nearly-deserted beach until I found a nice spot and laid out my towel. Great bulbous updraft clouds turn muted shades of pink and lavender as I downed the tropical drinks. I ran a hand down my leg to the anklet I’d been wearing for years, woven from threads I’d bought from Bedouin girls in the colors of the Sinai: midnight blue like the sea, turquoise like the sandy-bottomed lagoons, white like the wavelets crashing against the reefs, and gold-brown like the desert mountains. A talisman of how beautiful life could be. It was ragged and faded now, which seemed appropriate. Conal had been with me on that trip, my best friend from my years of travel. He’d be in New York soon for a journalism conference, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him to see me like this.

I stood too quickly and stumbled a few steps before striding into the warm, inviting water. The sky languidly faded to starry cobalt as I swam past the gentle breakers and into the swells, bobbing with the rhythm of the sea. I looked through the greying clouds to see if I could spot any planets—a comforting ritual that was nearly impossible in New York City. Mars and Jupiter were high and bright. I smiled at a sudden memory of Celeste’s dad showing me Jupiter through his backyard telescope. The wonder of seeing it for the first time not as a featureless white dot but as an entire world with its own tiny pinprick moons. A moment of pure, simple joy and discovery. How long had it been since I’d had one of those?

As the waters darkened, I reluctantly swam back to shore.

In my room I unwrapped the find from the reef and took a closer look. The bracelet was delicately designed, its silvery metal twisted into entwining vines with a diamond set in the space between each twist. The stones refracted even the dull lights of the hotel room into glittering brilliance. I draped it over my wrist to see how it looked against my tanned skin, and the ends came together as if joined by strong magnets. It fit perfectly. The edge of my mouth lifted. Jewelry was something I generally considered an expensive hassle. But this was a work of art.

CHAPTER ONE

New York’s subways are a forlorn place, I thought as I rode the interminable A train from JFK to my cramped apartment in Washington Heights, north of Harlem. It wasn’t just that they were such a rat-hole compared to the palatial Metro of Moscow, the charming trams of Istanbul, or the clean, efficient lines of Paris. The people also seemed depressed, with broken dreams and resignation written on their faces.

I trudged up four flights of grimy stairs, jammed the key in the door, and walked past my roommate Sara, who was washing a mountain of dishes in the closet-like kitchen.

“Hey,” I said shortly, the vibe of New York already washing away the modicum of relaxation I’d felt hours earlier.

“Hey, habibti!” Sara beamed over her shoulder, using an Arabic endearment. Her parents were from Lebanon. “How was the trip?”

“Fine.”

She scoffed gently. “I don’t know which beach you ended up on, but remind me not to go there. Hey, what’s that?” She pointed at my wrist.

I told her about the beach, the boat, and the bracelet. “I think the diamonds are real. It feels heavy, like a serious piece of jewelry. I spent the whole morning calling every hotel on Grace Bay trying to find the owner. I even went to the police. Nothing.”

“Huh,” she said. “I wonder who could have lost it.”

“I have this image in my head of an heiress on a yacht, her arms dripping with diamonds, a casual gesture flinging one of her baubles overboard unheeded.” I pantomimed a beach-bound Holly Golightly throwing her hands in the air theatrically, and Sara laughed.

“Well, my weekend wasn’t nearly as exciting. Work yesterday, solo Netflix and chill today. Anyway, go, unpack. Tomorrow you’ll wake up to a clean kitchen for once.”

“Thanks.” She was terrible about doing dishes, and I appreciated the effort. I didn’t really need to unpack, though. For a year I’d been living out of my suitcase as if I might be called to bigger and better things at any moment. In my small room with its ancient wood floors and Craigslist bed, desk, and office chair, I opened my laptop to see if any agents had gotten back to me (nope) and to scan the news in the Middle East (more of the same). My glance shifted to the room’s only decoration, a collection of quotations taped to the wall.

One read: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” —Theodore Roosevelt.

“Easy for you to say,” I muttered. “You were president of the United States.”

My eyes moved to the bookshelf, where half a dozen copies of my first book, Balkan Bruise, were lined up on the bottom shelf. Not long ago it had been a point of intense pride. I’d scraped by for a few years after college with odd jobs and writing gigs—like George Orwell and Frank McCourt before me, I liked to think—following what I thought was my passion. When I sold the rights to Balkan Bruise for $40,000, it felt like a sign from the universe that I was on the right path. It was such a thrill to see it in a major bookstore for the first time lined up next to bestsellers and classics.

But sales never really took off, and soon the next season’s books rolled in, and that was that. I knew it could happen if you weren’t lucky enough to break out. It was, in fact, the normal life cycle of most books. But it was jarring to watch six years of life and work fade away like it had barely happened.

I shook it off and used the advance money to explore the Middle East for two years and pour every ounce of talent and heart I had into my second book, The Silver Olive Tree. I envisioned this more ambitious and elegant project catapulting me into middle age with a life of travel, royalties, and doing what I loved full-time.

My publisher returned it so fast I wasn’t even sure they read it. Citing the first book’s poor sales, they cut me loose. My agent, blessed with a smarmy bestseller soon to be made into a major motion picture starring Emma Stone, dumped me as well.

Somehow I convinced myself it was only a minor setback. I moved to New York to find a new agent and publisher, taking on yet more odd jobs and writing gigs in between going to conferences, workshops, and author events. A few leads had raised high hopes. More than one agent said my book was great but not right for them—the literary equivalent of ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ But after a solid year of rejection, my hopes were starting to fade.

I leaned back and closed the laptop in frustration. It was a common New York story anyway, bordering on cliché. Sara wanted to be an actress. With her black ringlets, pale olive skin, and expressive blue eyes, it would be a waste if her face was never on a movie poster. But every time she got an audition, they’d tell her she didn’t look white enough to play a white girl and didn’t look Arab enough to play an Arab. For now she worked at a box office on Broadway.

My stomach rumbled. I was starving but not in the mood for beans and rice or an egg sandwich or any of the other cheap staples we lived on. Without thinking I mused out loud, “I wish we had a tiramisu in the fridge like the one I had at that little café in northwestern Italy. It was so humble, a mess of ingredients in a thick glass bowl. It looked terrible, actually. But then I bit into the first spoonful, and it was like… I can’t even describe it. Like eating love.”

There was no response from the kitchen, but I heard the faucet turn off.

“The mascarpone was probably made in the hills behind the village. The waiter’s grandmother probably sifted the cocoa by hand.” I sighed deeply. “There’s just nothing like that around here.”

The sound of clinking glasses emanated from the kitchen. “How about a glass of Trader Joe’s finest instead?”

I set the laptop aside and picked myself up. “Sounds like a plan.” I was a few steps from the kitchen when I heard a gasp.

“Lauren!”

“What?”

“You’re going to share, right?”

I looked in at her. “Share what?”

She raised an eyebrow. “The dessert in our fridge. The one you were just describing.”

“What?” I asked again, not sure what she was playing at.

She opened the refrigerator door wider. On the middle shelf sat an exact replica of the tiramisu I had enjoyed so thoroughly in the Cinque Terre, down to the heavy glass bowl.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Where did that come from?” I sputtered.

“You tell me,” she said and pulled the bowl out of the fridge. “Grab some spoons, this looks amazing!” I did as I was told, feeling like a computer that had divided by zero.

She took a bite directly from the bowl. “Oh my God.” Her eyes fluttered. “You were right. This may be the best thing I’ve ever had in my mouth. Seriously, where did you get it? And…” She narrowed her eyes. “Wait, when did you sneak it in here?”

“I didn’t. I had nothing to do with it.” I looked at her quizzically, wondering if she was punking me. Her look mirrored my own. I took an experimental bite and was immediately transported to the carefree time at the beginning of my travels when the world was so rich and open, with broad and welcoming horizons, and I could be anything I wanted, just like they told me in grade school.

Sara chuckled uneasily. “Well, I guess we have a tiramisu fairy godmother?”

“Or a generous neighbor.”

“Who broke into our house?”

“Maybe you forgot to lock the door. Or was it the super? Is he Italian? Is it your birthday or something?” I asked

“Not until December.”

“Weird…” We looked at it awkwardly for another few seconds. “I guess I’ll ask him about it next time I see him.”

“You do that. Meanwhile…” She scooped half of it onto a plate. “Wherever it came from, it’s amazing.” She kissed the air good-night and retired to her room.

I took the rest to my room and felt increasingly uneasy as I ate. It was truly perfect. And what an odd coincidence that it would show up on the same night I had that completely random thought. Drowsiness warred with confusion until I was too tired to keep trying to puzzle it out. I popped my earplugs in and fell asleep to the sound of my beating heart.

* * *

“Happy Birthday, Mom. Sorry I’m a little late…”

It was the next morning after a breakfast of three eggs on a bagel to make up for having dessert for dinner the night before. I didn’t plan on telling her about my flagrantly escapist trip to the islands. It was an open question how I’d pay off that credit card bill, and I didn’t need her to tell me how ridiculous it was.

“Don’t worry about it. I would have forgot it myself if Roxana hadn’t fixed me an apricot pie.”

Roxana never cooked, so it was quite a gesture. “How’d she do?”

Mom paused a moment too long. “Bless her heart…” she began. “It was really sweet.”

“Yeah, it’s the thought that counts.”

“No, I mean she put in four times as much sugar as she was supposed to.”

I laughed. “Well, it’s better than the time she overloaded the biscuits with baking soda.”

“Oh Lord, I almost forgot about that. I don’t think there’s anything sadder in the world than a whole pan of hot buttered biscuits in the trash.”

I sighed. I’d left Kansas with such big dreams. Right now, biscuits and apricot pie sounded better than anything I had going on.

“Anyway, what’s eating you? You sound kind of mopey.”

I raised an eyebrow at the phone. Mopey? You couldn’t say something dignified, like ‘depressed’ or ‘mired in existential despair’?

“I don’t know. I guess it’s been a year since I came to New York, and I’m not sure…”

“You don’t think you’ll ever sell that book?” She sounded like she’d been expecting it, which felt like a subtle knife in the ribs.

“I don’t know,” I said evenly. “I’m not sure what to do. Nothing seems to be working.”

“Well, that’s how it goes. I wanted to be an actress until I met your father.”

I slowly closed my eyes. Mom’s acting dreams had withered after she got pregnant at age nineteen—with me. I had killed her dreams and now mine were dying, too.

I opened my carved wooden jewelry box, a gift from a host family in Sarajevo that held a few nostalgic treasures: a dog tag given to me by a Russian soldier I had kissed on a train; an amulet of carved bone from a Buddhist monastery in Siberia; a seashell from a valley in the Sahara, evidence it had been under the sea millions of years ago; and now the bracelet. I pulled out the latest addition and tilted it back and forth to catch the light. I had always been careful with money, almost to a fault. Being frugal meant having the freedom to do what I wanted. Maybe maxing out my credit card was a subconscious attempt to force my hand—to give me that final push to find a steady paycheck and leave all this hope and uncertainty behind.

“Anyway, there’s a party tonight. Some ritzy college reunion thing. Maybe I’ll meet someone there who can help me find a real job.”

I could almost hear Mom brighten at the thought.

* * *

I let my hair dry in large curlers, put on a little black dress I’d bought at a thrift store when I was in college, brushed on eyeliner, and finished with lip gloss and turquoise drop earrings. The dress was a size too big, and its shade of black didn’t quite match the lightly scuffed ballet flats I borrowed from Sara. The bracelet was a bit much, but people would probably assume it was fake. I doubted I’d have a better excuse to wear it for a while.

The party was at a private residence on Central Park West. The doorman pointed me to a gilded elevator, which opened into a spacious apartment on the fourteenth floor with a wall of windows overlooking the green trees of Central Park. The couches were cream-colored, the rugs lush with patterns of cream and beige. Abstract wire sculptures adorned large niches in the walls.

Bracing myself, I walked toward a group of alums. They all had that polished New York look with three-figure haircuts and dry-clean-only clothes. As they chatted with aspartame smiles, brightly asking each other, “And what do you do?”, my mind drifted to another kind of gathering, a house party on a rooftop somewhere in the Mediterranean where the guests couldn’t possibly care less about anyone’s status or job title.

“Lauren!” I heard from the direction of the elevator. I turned and saw Anna, my freshman year roommate, saunter into the room. Effervescent, blonde, and originally from Manhattan, she was totally at ease at these types of gatherings. Last I heard she was working seventy-hour weeks at a consulting firm. Whatever that was.

“Hi Anna,” I said, relieved to see a familiar face.

“How’s it going, world traveler?” she asked playfully.

My left eye twitched involuntarily. “Where’s the wine?”

She hesitated, then smiled knowingly. “I think people are heading in that direction.” We followed them to the dining room, where bottles of chardonnay were lined up like soldiers next to bottles of zinfandel. Behind them lay an impressive spread of appetizers.

“Great,” I said, grabbing a bottle of zin. “The only two kinds of wine I don’t like. I wish they had just one bottle of cabernet.”

Anna blinked, her expression wavering between confusion and concern. “That’s a cab, isn’t it?” I looked at the bottle I was holding. “Lucky you,” she said. “I wish they had a sauv blanc, but oh well.” She poured herself a cup of the chardonnay.

I was still peering at the bottle in my hand. “But… this was a zinfandel when I picked it up, wasn’t it? The bottles were all the same.”

Anna stared for a moment, then dropped her voice. “Honey, you seem tense. And I think you’ve lost weight. Are you OK?”

I sighed and gave her a run-down of what was going on in my life as I opened the lone bottle of cabernet and filled a clear plastic cup. Anna pursed her lips in a sympathetic frown, then perked up again. “Well, you can always write,” she said cheerfully. “As a hobby, I mean.”

I nodded at the sage advice, downed the wine quickly, and poured another cup, then another.

I wasn’t exactly sure how I ended up sitting on the floor next to my bed back in my apartment. A few hours, I realized with some alarm, were missing. That hadn’t happened since college. I stood up shakily, sat on the edge of the bed, and rested my forehead in my hand.

“God I wish I had a cup of coffee,” I muttered.

The scent of coffee filled the room and I slowly raised my eyes. A steaming mug was sitting on the desk next to my laptop. The mug was made of thick white ceramic, the kind found in diners. I hadn’t noticed it when I came in. Had Sara left it for me?

A wave of nausea rolled over me. I lunged for the wastebasket at the foot of the bed and heaved into it. The trash can had mesh sides, and my wine-stained offering began oozing out of it and onto the cracked hardwood floor.

Grimacing, I slurred, “Ugh, I wish I didn’t have to clean that tomorrow.”

The vomit vanished. I barely had time to register this before I hurled again. I wiped my mouth. “I wish that puke would go away, too.” It did, and I raised my eyebrows wanly. I’d never hallucinated while drinking. It was vaguely worrying, but I wasn’t in the right state of mind to worry very much.

Flopping onto the bed, I pulled off my clothes and lay my head on my cheap, squashed-flat pillow. “I wish it was thicker,” I murmured and felt it rise beneath my head like baking bread as I drifted off.

###

Thus begins an adventure that will take Lauren to Croatia, Switzerland, Beirut, and the Sinai, and [spoiler redacted] as she explores the mysterious object around her wrist and the mysterious forces that shape who we are.

Two more chapters are available to anyone who might like to read them. Just email me at pamolson at gmail dot com. Thoughts, questions, and feedback are always appreciated!

Here’s a synopsis in the style of mainstream literary fiction. Feedback on this is welcome as well.

Sinai Moon

Lauren Clay is a writer and world traveler who, after a decade of “following her dreams,” has reached the end of her spiritual and financial rope. She’s on the cusp of dropping it all and getting a “real job” when she finds a strange object that offers the terrifying gift of unconditional freedom.

In the weeks that follow she explores the meaning of success in Switzerland, romance in Beirut, and the heights of the human spirit in the Sinai. Just as life is starting to make sense, a series of small acts of carelessness snowball into dire consequences for herself, her family, and those she loves, threatening to undermine everything she’s learned about how to live well in a world full of uncertainty.

Packed with romance and adventure, humor and wisdom, Sinai Moon is at once a thrilling travelogue and a compelling work of literary fiction that explores the gulf between the way life is and the way we expect it to be.

Rania’s Story

Shortly before graduating from college, my dear friend Rania from Jayyous (a major character in my book) married Sharif, a poor but kind man who lost his parents when he was young and never finished high school. He was incredibly supportive of Rania’s education, and they had a beautiful baby boy named Karam in 2007.

Two years later she was pregnant with a little girl, and Sharif secured a permit to work in Israel so he could finish building their house and support his growing family.

Then… disaster struck. Before her husband had a chance to use his permit, he was brutally arrested in the middle of the night by armed Israeli soldiers who beat him in front of his pregnant wife and child and put him behind bars for a year on bogus charges.

Little Lusan, born while her father was in prison

When her husband was finally released, he was a changed man, in bad health and bad spirits with no hope of ever getting a permit to work in Israel again. The only jobs he could get were tough physical labor that paid little (and prices is Palestine are hideously inflated due to the occupation).

In 2010, Rania took the initiative and found meaningful work with the Syndicate of Psychological Social Workers, an organization that sponsors activities, classes, and counseling sessions to improve the psychological health of the community. It’s a desperately needed service in a town suffering so badly from the occupation (violence, vicious arrests, land expropriation and unemployment) and other stresses (the usual societal problems like spousal abuse, disabilities, and mental illness).

Unfortunately, it’s not a paid position. The Syndicate has been trying to get funding for years, and Salam Fayyad visited more than once and personally promised funding. But for various reasons — such as Israel’s withholding of Palestinian tax funds to try to prevent the formation of a Palestinian unity government — it has never materialized. Their office doesn’t even have working phones. We have tried many times to find outside funding, but most covers only projects and materials, not salaries. And due to exigencies in Gaza, Syria, and elsewhere, aid funds are scarcer than ever.

So, for the past several years, I’ve been raising funds to send Rania $300 per month as a nominal salary so that she can continue the work and keep raising her beautiful kids, Karam and Lusan.

When I visited Palestine in 2011, Rania invited me to see the work she does on a daily basis. It was a whirlwind tour. First we went to the Syndicate office and talked with other volunteers. One was taking a group of women through lessons that would count toward their university training in counseling. One of the male volunteers was a music teacher. Another was a policeman, most of whose family is in Israeli prison. One of his sons was unable to finish high school because the Israelis took him when he was 16.

They all had the disarming, earnest friendliness I’m used to in Palestine, the same direct and matter-of-fact way of talking about their hardships, the same undying hope that telling their story just one more time will somehow make a difference. And they all spoke of Rania as if she’s indispensable.

Next we visited a home for the mentally disabled. Most of the people there had Down syndrome. Many of them recognized Rania, and their faces lit up when they saw her. A teacher showed us the different classrooms, from the one was for people who could barely function at all, who basically just played or danced all day, to the most advanced, where students could learn to read and write and perform other basic skills.

Finally we went to a UN school for refugee children, where Rania and several other women organized an after school program for girls through the local YMCA. About a hundred high-spirited first-graders showed up, all of them girls, and we set up games of tug-of-war, sack races, hop-scotch, hula hoops, and best of all, the game where everyone grabs the edge of a parachute cloth and jumbles it around with balls on top so that the balls jump around. Everyone was laughing the whole time we did it.

Rania whispered to me, “When the girls are doing this, they forget all their stress!”

Afterwards we handed out juice boxes and cakes and did face-painting and drawing on a giant piece of butcher paper. The girls were engaged the whole time, their eyes shining, supporting each other through every challenge. Without these women, and the smattering of funding from the YMCA for the supplies, these girls would simply be trudging home to crowded cinderblock alleys and small rooms that may or may not have electricity.

It was incredibly humbling to see so many volunteers, who had difficult and busy lives of their own, spending their time helping others instead of throwing up their hands or ignoring their even-less-fortunate neighbors.

Since then Rania has continued and intensified her social work in Tulkarem. A recent project involved organizing a summer camp for children, especially kids from refugee camps. Activities included counseling, art, drama, playing, swimming, and education about human rights and international law.

One ten-year-old boy came up to her after a workshop on human rights and said angrily, “You give us exercises and let us play, and you say nice words about international law, but we still don’t have human rights. You should be honest about this.”

Kids aren’t stupid. They know what they see.

She was taken aback, but she said, “I understand, I feel with your anger. God willing, one day we will have human rights.”

It’s a terrible thing to have to say to a ten-year-old. But it’s good to give them forums in which they can learn what they’re missing and vent about their pent-up feelings, so that hopefully one day they will be more effective in the struggle to implement their rights.

The summer activities also had a twist: The mothers of the children were invited to some of the activities, including picnics and a day in an amusement park. Rania said they were amazed, because it was the first time they had been included in something like that. They were also given free counseling sessions, and many said it was the first time anyone had allowed them to express their feelings and cry.

Mothers in Palestine have to keep the family together more than anyone. The society would quickly collapse without their strength. But there’s little space for them to break down or show emotion. Day to day they feel they have to remain composed, even when their heart is breaking.

Rania said she would do what she could to continue providing these services to the people who need them. And I’m glad to do what I can as well.

100% of the money you give goes to Rania. I pay for all rewards offered during fundraisers and all Western Union fees. So what you give is what she gets, and she in turn gives to the hundreds of people she helps with her work. It’s an investment guaranteed to grow many times over. You can’t say that about many investments these days.

My Paypal email is pamolson02@yahoo.com, or you can email me for details about how to send a check. If you’d prefer to send money directly to her via Western Union, I can send instructions on how to do it — it’s very easy.

Fundraising and donating aren’t nearly as hard as raising amazing children while trying to be a rock for a society under brutal, strangling occupation. But the one makes the other possible, and it’s an honor to be a small part of it.

Even $5 or $10 makes a huge difference, believe me.

Thank you.

Ramadan Kareem!

Love and light,

Pamela

Spring Tour: Scotland and the Gulf

Here’s the schedule for my upcoming travels. If you’ll be in the area, I’d be glad to see you there!

Scotland

March 28: Serenity Café, Edinburgh, 7pm

March 29: Book signing at Calton Books, Glasgow, 2pm

Yes Bar, Glasgow, 7pm

March 30: Talk to Social Studies students at Stowe College, Glasgow

The Annex Healthy Living Center, Glasgow, 7pm

April 1: Café Café, Irvine, 7pm

Amsterdam

April 4-6, visiting friends

Bahrain

April 9: La Fontaine Centre, 7pm

April 10: Words Bookstore Café, 11am

Kuwait

April 12: National Library of Kuwait, 6:30

Qatar

April 15: Lecture at Weill Cornell Medical College

UAE

April 15-19, visiting friends

Turkey

April 20 until the end of June with my husband 🙂

The Bracelet

Not a travel destination, but a novel I’m working on. The first six chapters are finished, and I’ve sent them to several people for feedback. You are welcome to them as well — feedback is always appreciated but never required.

If you’d like to check them out, send me an email at pamolson at gmail. You can read Chapter One here.

The Bracelet: Chapter 3

Note: You can read Chapters 1 and 2 here if you haven’t yet.

. . .

(This is a rough mock-up of the final cover design)

“Not the worst job in the world.” Conal’s fine light brown hair looked particularly windblown under a cloudless Dalmatian sky.

Lauren raised her glass of prosek, the sweet local wine, in agreement. They were on the island of Hvar, its main settlement a steep crescent-shaped city of white stone buildings with red-tile roofs hugging a sapphire bay, all overlooked by rugged pine tree hills and an imposing Spanish fortress. No motorized vehicles were allowed in the historic center, leaving its stone-paved plazas ethereally peaceful. Scents of lavender and rosemary, two local crops, drifted on the breeze. Conal had chosen an outdoor café on a marble terrace whose view took in the picturesque town, the hills, and boats bobbing on the calm waters.

“So, Ms. Lauren. Any new thoughts?”

“I was thinking it might be easier to start with what I can do for other people, and go from there.”

“Like what?”

“Like sending aid to places that need it. Money or food. Just as an example.”

Conal looked down with a small sigh. “I was in Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya a few years back. I saw a lot of good intentions corrupted and a lot of dangerous unintended consequences. How much experience do you have?”

“None. I could spend time studying that.”

“Sure. But plenty of people with PhDs and years of field experience have done more harm than good. Not to mention, people will wonder how you’re creating food or paying for massive aid. What will you tell them?”

Lauren threw her hands up. “I don’t know. I still haven’t even worked out what to tell my mom. She thinks I’m here on a freelance gig.”

“I don’t have to tell you, you’ve got to keep this to yourself. Otherwise someone will kill you for that thing.”

“I know.” She sighed. “So where does that leave me?”

“It seems to leave you as one person with a lot of freedom.”

* * *

After a leisurely swim the next morning in the clear waters of the harbor, Lauren found the marble terrace café again, ordered a bijela kava (‘white coffee,’ Croatia’s version of a latte), and conjured up books by her favorite authors: Henry David Thoreau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Jung, Khalil Gibran, Hermann Hesse, Lao Tzu, Walt Whitman.

Some time later a stray sunbeam fell across her eyes at a steep angle, and she realized with a start how many hours must have passed. She shoved the books into her bag and dashed toward the vegetarian restaurant she had chosen for dinner with Conal. The city was labyrinthine, with carved stone steps leading up and down narrow alleys accented with bursts of bougainvillea, bright white or luscious fuschia. By the time she found Conal at the restaurant, she was twenty minutes late. He was sitting at a table on the veranda munching on bread and olive oil.

“So sorry,” she said, out of breath. “I was trying to call on the wisdom of the ages.” She opened her bag to show him the books’ spines.

“Any luck?” he asked mildly.

“It’s a comfort, actually. It’s hard to imagine a world where these men never put pen to paper.” The terrace was made of the usual white stone, worn smooth with age. They were further into the city but also higher up so that they still had a stunning view of a cotton candy sunset over the water. Ceramic vases with wildflowers and sprigs of lavender at each table perfumed the space. “I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer. To have a chance to try to pay it forward, even if only a little.”

“That’s a nice way to put it.”

She shook her head. “I really wanted to be like these guys.” She waved toward the bag of books. “Like Thoreau. He went to Harvard and thought it was bullshit, so he taught school for a while, hung out with philosophers, joined his dad’s pencil making business. A friend told him to get serious about his writing, and he went to the woods for a while, then he ran into a tax collector and refused to pay because of slavery and the Mexican War. He went to jail and ended up writing a piece about it that inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy. Now they study him at Harvard.

“And Thomas Paine, he was a failed corset-maker. Roald Dahl and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were pilots in World War II. But it’s not like I can join the air force or try my hand at corset-making or refuse to pay taxes and get where they got. I have to find my own version of life. And I had this faith, this illusion maybe, that if I followed the impulses that felt most genuine to me, somehow things would work out. It was like running off a cliff and believing the universe would catch me. And it did for a while, and then… I know this probably sounds ridiculous, but when things went so wrong with my second book, I felt betrayed by the universe. Like I trusted it, I held up my end of the deal, and it kicked me to the curb.” She rested her head in her hand, idly picking a lavender blossom out of the centerpiece, crushing it, and inhaling the scent. “People trusted me with their stories. I hoped if I could write a good enough book, I could help change things. Now it feels like it was all just a waste of time. I could have been a brain surgeon by now, you know?”

“You could have been a lot of things,” he agreed. “But I don’t think you want to be a brain surgeon. Would you want your brain surgeon to be someone who didn’t want to be a brain surgeon?”

She smiled and threw the crushed remnants of the lavender blossom at him, and he ducked. “I could have worked on cold fusion or something,” she said.

“You told me you hated working in physics labs.”

She rolled her eyes, conceding the point. “But doesn’t it seem sad that I have nothing to show for my young, promising years? My mom thought I was nuts to do what I did, and it seems now like she was right.”

Conal found a lavender blossom on the table and flicked it off. “Look, I know it’s hard to see it right now, but maybe nothing has gone wrong. Maybe this is just part of the life of a writer. But I have to say, something is going on with you. You’re a shadow of the person I knew in Palestine. Before you make any major life decisions, you need to deal with that first.”

“How?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. But if you had learned the lessons you needed to learn by now, this wouldn’t be so hard for you. You wouldn’t have lost faith so easily.”

“Easily?” She looked at him sharply, then sighed. “I know. My life is fine. I’m young, I’m healthy, I have citizenship in a powerful country. And now this.” She jiggled the bracelet. “I should think of it as a gift, right? Not a burden.”

“Sounds like a good place to start.” The wind caught his hair, and she watched it flop over and back again.

She smirked. “Sounds pretty obvious. Why is our culture so full of truisms nobody actually lives by?”

“That’s a good question. Worth exploring.”

The food was long gone and they were starting to get drunk on the wine. “Shall we?” Conal asked. They walked back to the hotel his publisher had sprung for. There were two queen beds in the room, and they each chose one and passed out. Lauren had a thought in the back of her mind: Wouldn’t it be nice if—

But the thought was chopped off, half finished, by the curtain of sleep.

* * *

When Lauren awoke, Conal was working intensely on his laptop, so she slipped out to visit the hotel sauna. For lunch they ambled back to their favorite café and ordered double espressos and omelettes with spicy pork sausage and sheep’s milk cheese.

“So you want to change the world and be a famous writer,” Conal said without much preamble, “and you’re upset because you haven’t done it. I get that. If I wasn’t an award-winning journalist by now, I’d feel like something was wrong, too.”

She glared at him, but he could see the suppressed smile.

“So I did some research on the topic this morning, and I found some quotes that might interest you. First, Leo Tolstoy: ‘If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: you can become better yourself.’”

She looked up and away. “I think I see where this is going.”

“And here’s one by Ramana Maharshi: ‘Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.’”

Lauren laughed. “OK, fine, I get it. If I want to change the world, I should probably start with the hot mess you see before you.”

“At least for a few months,” he said with relief. “Honestly, what sense does it make to try to change something as massive and complicated as the world when you don’t even understand yourself?” There was a sudden tinge of sadness in his voice. “You can go anywhere in the world, do anything you want to do.”

She sighed. “I don’t know. How long am I supposed to just mess around?”

He shook his head. “That’s the kind of limited thinking I’m talking about. You’re not the same person you were before, and even then you weren’t the type to ‘just mess around.’ I wouldn’t have made it through my summer in Palestine if not for you, and no one even paid you for that. Now you have a chance to travel in a different way, in a different state of mind, for a completely different reason.”

She scoffed, mostly at herself, thinking about how frantically she had been chasing stupid jobs in New York just to try to gain some footing. It meant that whatever she had learned in the past ten years, she had not managed to find any real, strong, solid footing. She had been cut off from the old feeling of flow for so long she could barely remember what it felt like. Here was a rare chance to correct that.

She shrank from the thought; if it had been terrifying and daunting before, when she was just out of college and it was cute to be an aimless backpacker, it was even more humiliating and humbling now. The stakes felt higher and failure more shameful—especially when she basically had a superpower to help her. She breathed for a while, feeling her resistance to the notion, the voices in her head saying she wasn’t remotely worthy, and surely there were more important things to focus on. She had heard the same voices ten years earlier. Conal waited.

Finally the idea sank all the way to a level of herself that Lauren hadn’t accessed in a long time. It spread there like a pool of cool water with an ancient freshness that quietly beckoned her. She closed her eyes tighter as the last of the resistance tried to tear her away. But the battle was lost. The path ahead wasn’t easy, but it felt right.

She opened her eyes and looked at Conal. “Where should I go?”

He leaned back and shrugged, trying not to look too satisfied. “Where do you want to go?” The waiter delivered their vodka-pineapple cocktails, and she absently wiped at the perspiration on her glass. “Don’t judge,” Conal said. “Just the first thing that comes to mind.”

“What comes to mind right now is Switzerland, to be honest.”

“Oh?”

“I was there once for a few days. It was gorgeous but so expensive. I’ve always wanted to go back and head up into the mountains and hike around for a week or two. That sounds so nice right now.”

“Great. Here’s another question: What’s something you’ll regret never doing if you don’t do it while you’re young and single?”

Lauren glanced up thoughtfully, and a look of chagrin crossed her face.

“What was that thought?”

A crazy, inchoate plan was forming in her mind, and it was so unlike her, she feared trying to explain it to Conal before she’d thought it over herself might kill the idea in its infancy. “I want to go to Beirut,” was all she said, her eyes alive with excitement.

He narrowed his eyes but didn’t press. “Great choice. Amazing city.”

“And some of the most beautiful people on the planet.”

Conal smiled a bit sadly. Lauren wondered if he had history with a Lebanese girl. When Lauren met him, she was dating a Palestinian who lived forty miles and seven checkpoints away, while Conal had a girlfriend back home in London. They spent hours talking about politics and their love lives over endless bottles of red wine from the Cremisan monastery near Bethlehem and beer from a Palestinian Christian village called Taybeh. She told him an embarrassing number of stories about her disastrous love life. Come to think of it, Conal hadn’t been nearly as forthcoming.

“Moving on, question three,” he said quickly. “Where have you spent time that you felt something special, or peaceful, or where you really felt at home?”

“That’s easy,” she said, brandishing her anklet. She didn’t have to say more. They both had a reverential love for the Sinai, a remote triangle of mountainous desert wedged between Asia and Africa and surrounded by coral reefs. It had the feel of its own little world, a Lotus Land of friendliness, charm, and otherworldly beauty.

“So that’s a start. Switzerland, then Beirut, then Egypt. Sounds amazing, actually.”

She couldn’t help but agree.

###

THANK YOU to my Kickstarter supporters

Thanks to the following lovely people, I’ll have what I need to edit and design my upcoming novel, The Bracelet: A Novel of Freedom. All of these backers will receive an electronic copy of the book as soon as it’s ready, and the other rewards will be coming along either in the coming week or as soon as they are available.

The Kickstarter campaign is posted here, for reference, and the first chapter of the book is posted here.

So, heartfelt thanks to:

Liz Aab, Fida Samhouri, Robbie Roy, Linus Hart, Catharine Abbott, Hani Shaabi, Stefanie Zigby, Truddi Greene, Bruce, Yeou-Shiuh Hsu, Omar Mesarwi, Judy Warner, Charlton Price, Garth Bishop, Holly & Daniel, Les Vaughn, Shawn D Langrick, Bruce K. Anderson, Nik in Maine, Amin, Pam Carter, Jess McNally, Will Ramadan & Kristalle Herda, Tura Campanella Cook, Tom Barham, Raquel, Jennifer Calvert, Meredith, Carmel Mawle, Imad Hanna, Andy Perdue, annie robbins, Pat Brown, Dora-Maria, Alice Bach, Patricia Madson, marianne dhillon, Carmel Arikat, pat hewett, Guy Benintendi, Saundra Hoover, maura donahue, Noor Elashi and Larry Scott, Nora Jacquez, Polly Johnson, Ellie Macklin, D Krulick, Marty Scantlen, Kevin Henry, Gail Miller, Helene Theros, Katie Clark-Alsadder, Donde Anderson, Eric Sarriot, Karen E. Robinson, Ken Burres, mark bosold, akmesarwi, Karen Platt, Peter Lake, Anne de Jong, Reba, Teddeaux Lamoureux III, Diana, Jeanne B., Colleen, Peter Nielsen, AWS, Gloria Olivier, Hitri Shf, Charlton Price, YC, Kerry Fina, Diana Syam, Megan Farr, Katie H, California Bill, Amanda Kuhn, Kara Jenkinson, Lyla Rayyan, Pamela Shier, Robin Thompson, Corinna, Betsy Talbot, Veronica Gilley, EY, Kristine Knutter, Sonja, and Tam

I’ll be thinking of all of you as I finish the book, and I truly appreciate the faith and support that helps sustain me as I do. You all are the best, and I hope you’ll find the book a worthy investment.

Lots of love and warm wishes for 2015.

The Bracelet: Chapter 2

Note: You can read Chapter One here if you haven’t yet.
.

Lauren’s body felt hollow after Sara left, the way it feels after a long cry. She absently wished the food away and sat with her hands braced against her knees like a person recovering from a panic attack. For a long time she just breathed, her mind a jar of mud that needed time to settle. She cursed the fact that her door had no lock. Then she laughed, a short, strangled sound. “I wish the door had a lock,” she said, and it did. That was better.

She looked around the room, replaying the bizarre events of the past few days in her mind. It had started when she got back from the Caribbean, and the only thing she brought back from there was…

Her eyes came to rest on her wrist, and she furrowed her brow. It was an absurd theory, but there was an easy way to test it. She took the bracelet off, set it on the desk, and said, “I wish for, I don’t know, a button.” Nothing happened. “On the desk,” she specified. Still nothing. “I wish for a barstool on the rug,” she tried. The rug remained empty. She slipped the bracelet on again. “OK, I wish for a bunch of grapes.” A glistening green bunch appeared where the French toast had been a few moments earlier.

She jumped. Jesus Christ. Shakily taking the bracelet off again, she held it up and studied it. It sparkled impassively. Her image of an heiress casually losing jewelry would have to be replaced by something even more unbelievable — or more sinister. A tingle of foreboding crept up her spine. Maybe there had been a struggle. Maybe worse. Or maybe someone wanted to get rid of it.

She shook her head, and another mystery occurred to her. She was pretty sure she hadn’t been wearing the bracelet that morning when she wished for eggs Benedict, but she was definitely wearing it when she wished Sara would go away. “It must not work on people,” she reasoned with equal parts disappointment and relief. That kind of power would be too creepily God-like, too easy to abuse.

Her eyes closed wearily. It was late and her mind was a wreck; it couldn’t handle one more crazy thought, theory, or question. Maybe things would be clearer in the morning somehow. She placed the bracelet in her jewelry box and drifted into uneasy sleep.

She awoke on a hard, small bed in a dark, bare room. There were bars on the window. She heard a deafening clang behind her. Looking back, she saw a figure retreating from a wall of bars. She was in prison. Why? She looked at her wrist, ready to wish the bars away. The bracelet was gone. She sat up abruptly, panic permeating every pore. They’ve taken it. But who were they? What were they going to do with it? What were they going to do with her?

She gasped and turned over, and she was back in her little room in Washington Heights with its new blue rug, a thin sheen of clammy sweat covering her body. Early light filtered through her window as she grabbed the bracelet, got dressed, and fled without knowing where she was going.

Instinctively she headed toward the George Washington Bridge. It was 7am, long before she would normally get up, and she appreciated the relative freshness in the air. She passed a young man with stringy black hair sitting against a wall and staring at the sidewalk. A dirty backpack and dejected-looking dog rested beside him. I wish I had a hundred dollar bill in my pocket, she thought. She pulled out a crisply-folded bill and handed it to the young man.

“Thanks,” he mumbled as he crumpled it into his backpack without looking.

“You’re welcome,” she said, feeling a bit deflated.

She wished for another twenty dollars and bought a chai latte along the way, leaving the rest as a tip.

There was a particular spot where she loved to sit and think, where she could see trees, water, the sky, and soaring civil architecture. A hard-to-find, narrow pedestrian underpass smelling of stale urine opened onto an unmarked path that led through a broken chain-link fence to a small bluff under the bridge overlooking the Hudson Parkway. The green New Jersey bluffs rose on the other side of the Hudson and there was a lovely view up the river. Cars whirred by above and below on perpendicular paths, like a frenetic white noise machine.

As she wrapped her arms around her knees and took a sip of the warming tea, a memory bubbled up of being eight years old, when her mom was still struggling after the divorce and she was made fun of at school for things about her parents she didn’t understand. She remembered desperately wanting magical powers, praying for them every night for years, wishing for them on every birthday cake. She reasoned with God that it would be an efficient arrangement; she could solve her own problems and wouldn’t have to bother Him about them anymore. In all the books she read, if the protagonist wanted something badly enough, he or she could usually find a way to get it, against all odds. If she petitioned God and birthday candles long enough, she hoped it would work out for her as well. The childish delusion lasted until her early teens, when she started wishing about boys instead.

But now, decades later, her ridiculous prayer had somehow been answered. As a kid she would have known just what to do with it. Her desires were simple, her view of life narrow. Now? She felt utterly lost, without any hint of a roadmap, unable to catch her breath.

Even a few years ago she had felt more certain about the world and her place in it. Her first dream as a kid, tucked in a corner of the Wichita Public Library, had been to join the great men of history (they were almost always men): explorers, scientists, philosophers. Inspired by National Geographic, she was also interested in the environment, which led to politics. As she dug into that dismal subject, she realized books would only take her so far; she needed to see the world with her own eyes. She studied abroad in Russia, where she met politicians, professors, musicians, and ordinary people with completely different life experiences, and soldiers and refugees fresh from the carnage in Chechnya. After that it was excruciating to go back to college and try to pay attention in class. She’d had a taste of the real action, and she wanted more.

For three years she scraped by with odd jobs and writing gigs across Europe and Russia, sometimes waiting tables, washing dishes, or sweeping floors — like George Orwell and Frank McCourt before her, she liked to think — always on the cusp of hitting zero and having to limp back home. Selling the first book had been a godsend and validation, until it became a humiliating disappointment and a stone around her neck. Maybe it was time to face the fact that she’d had it wrong from the beginning, and it was time to change direction entirely.

At least, for as long as this strange miracle lasted, she didn’t have to worry about money. She wondered if the wishes might run out at some point, or if there was a set number of molecules she could manipulate. She decided to proceed with a bit more caution. No sense squandering near-omnipotence on rugs and chai lattes.

More than anything she needed to talk to someone. Sara was lovely but inclined to melodrama, and she couldn’t keep a secret to save her life, and if a secret like this got out, it was only a matter of time before someone robbed or killed her for it. It was terrifying to think of the damage a ruthless person could do with it, the blood that could be shed as people fought over it. She had seen people killed for far less.

It was a stroke of luck that Conal would be visiting New York soon for a conference on narrative journalism. He had turned down a prestigious job with Britain’s top news source to work for a second-tier paper so he could write what he considered true instead of what his bosses considered expedient. He’d won several awards for investigative pieces, but he remained humble and hardworking. They had met when they lived in the same apartment building in Palestine for a summer. He was the most levelheaded person she knew and the only one she could trust with a secret like this.

Feeling slightly clearer about things, Lauren walked back to her apartment and conjured up a lightly beat-up rolling suitcase containing one million dollars in small bills. She spread the bills evenly and wished for a padded false bottom to cover them. Then she stuffed the suitcase with jeans, sweaters, and her winter coat and hid it well in the back of her closet. Just in case.

* * *

The next few days were surreal. She stopped looking for jobs. She stopped answering emails and reading the news. Until Conal came, she pretended to be a traveler in New York, seeing it with new eyes, with the carefree attitude of exploration and enjoyment she used to have in exotic foreign cities. She relaxed into the comforting sense of time being a friend rather than an enemy; of the sunset being a highlight of the day instead of a dim event outside a window shut tight against intrusions; of sitting in cafés reading novels without a hint of shame. She took the Subway to neighborhoods she had never seen before and walked around, smiling and greeting people like the most soft-headed tourist imaginable.

She wondered: Was happiness really only the province of travelers and people with trust funds or magic bracelets?

* * *

Conal blinked a few times. His eyes, the luminous color of green sea glass, narrowed as if searching for the angle. Lauren knew the look; it was the same one she had given Sara when she insisted a hand-crafted Italian tiramisu was sitting in their refrigerator.

They were seated across from each other in a high-backed booth in a trendy sushi place north of Little Italy. The dark-paneled walls muted the conversations around them to a low buzz, and a white tea candle in a clear hurricane glass glowed steadily between them.

She sighed. “Name an object. A small object that I can hold in my hand.”

“A lemon,” he said in his Irish-flavored British accent, playing along. He’d grown up in southern Ireland, studied at Oxford, and spent his professional life based in London.

She brought her hand out from under the table. It contained a lemon.

He looked impressed. “OK. That’s a nice trick.”

“It’s not a trick. Name another object.”

“A tiny bust of Vladimir Lenin.”

She smiled. “Good one.” Then she set one on the table.

His expression wavered. He looked under the table at Lauren’s hands, which she flipped over so he could see they were empty. “Interesting. OK, er… a cup of Earl Grey Tea. In a golden wine glass.”

“Damn,” she muttered and he smirked, seeming relieved the odd joke was over. “No, I can do it,” she said, lifting a gilded goblet onto the table and setting it down quickly. It sloshed a bit, spilling a few drops on the table. The smell of bergamot was unmistakable. “It’s just really hot.”

All trace of amusement vanished from his face. He looked at her, looked under the table again, turned pale. “What the…? How did you…? How in the hell did you do that?”

“Keep your voice down. Look, I know it sounds crazy. It is crazy.”

“But what…? What…? How?”

“I don’t know. I just know it has something to do with this bracelet.”

He looked at it with dazed eyes. “Good God.” She let him sit with his thoughts for a while. Finally he looked at her. “But what does it mean?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did it come with instructions or anything?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“And what if someone tries to take it from you?” He looked around briefly and dropped his voice to its lowest register. “There are people who will kill for that if they figure out what you have.”

Her hand instinctively covered the bracelet. “Are you considering it?”

He rolled his eyes. But there was a glitch in his countenance, as if he hadn’t really considered it until just that moment. Lauren drew back slightly. Conal sighed. “Look, I appreciate that you trusted me enough to tell me about this. But whatever it is, it’s your deal, OK? You found it, your deal. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I’m kind of glad as hell it isn’t me. Where did you get that thing anyway?”

* * *

The next day Lauren found a specialty jewelry shop and asked the owner if he could reinforce the bracelet by attaching it to a steel loop and covering it with braided leather. The sad-eyed jeweler with Einstein hair accepted without comment her story that the bracelet had sentimental value, and she wanted to wear it without having to worry about theft. She was sure that in New York, he had heard far stranger requests.

When he finished the modifications and clamped it on her wrist, it looked tasteful but valueless, and he assured her it would be impossible to remove without heavy wire cutters.

Walking home she was thinking about the warm turquoise water and the strange glint in the coral below. Part of her wished she had shrugged and moved on with the others. Part of her wanted to chuck the bracelet into the East River and get on with the demoralizing job search. But she had investigated. It was who she was. And now she had to face the consequences. Whatever that meant.

Panting from the five-story climb, she unlocked the heavy apartment door, trying her best to muffle the loud locking mechanism. Lauren had managed to sidestep Sara’s questions so far by claiming an uncle had sold his land in Texas and was sending gifts to his family with the proceeds. But Sara wasn’t stupid. She noticed Lauren had stopped looking for work and was acting strange in general.

“Hi there.” Sara emerged from the kitchen, and Lauren jumped.

“Oh, hey.”

“What happened to your bracelet?”

Lauren sighed. “I don’t want it to get stolen, so I had it wrapped in leather.”

Sara nodded dubiously. “Where’d you get it anyway?”

“I told you.”

“Right. You found it at the bottom of the ocean.”

Lauren winced. That story had actually been true. “Look, Sara. I love you. I appreciate you looking out for me. But I can’t deal with any more questions right now.” It was precisely the wrong thing to say. Sara’s eyes glinted with the excitement of kindled curiosity, and Lauren suddenly reached her limit. She slowly closed her eyes. “All right, fine.” She had lied to enough border guards, she ought to be able to come up with a plausible enough story to get Sara off her back. “Here’s the truth. My uncle didn’t sell his land in Texas. He actually died.”

Sara’s face froze. “Oh,” she said quietly. “Sorry.”

“Thanks. I didn’t know him well, but he made a lot of money in oil in the eighties, and since he never had children, he left the money to his nieces and nephews. So,” she shrugged apologetically, “I guess I don’t need to worry about getting a job for a while.”

“Wow.” Sara slowly spun the mystic topaz ring on her right hand. “Well… condolences and congratulations both, I guess.” Her apparent jealousy meant she probably bought it.

Lauren relaxed a bit. “But listen, it’s something I don’t deserve. It just fell into my lap. So I’d like to spread the wealth a little. Is it OK if I pay your rent for the rest of the year?”

Sara froze again. “Oh my God. Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you’re serious? I mean, it’s a lot—”

“It’s fine. Really.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Lauren was starting to feel awkward when Sara suddenly squealed and danced around. “Free rent! It’s a real estate miracle! It’s the New York dream!” She grabbed Lauren’s hands, and Lauren joined her and laughed. It was a relief to be on good terms again, and at least she knew part of the truth — that Lauren suddenly had access to a lot of resources she hadn’t earned. As long as Lauren was paying Sara’s rent, she suspected she wouldn’t complain.

“So what are you going to do?” Sara asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know. I’m still in shock, to be honest.”

“No wonder you’ve been acting so weird. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was just something I needed to process. I haven’t told anyone except Conal.”

“The hot journalist?”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “You know he’s like a brother to me.”

“Whatever. So what do you think you’re going to do?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to be a writer. And I didn’t succeed, I mean not in making a living at it.”

“Well, now you don’t have to worry about making a living at it.” She sighed. “God, you’re so lucky.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said weakly. It was the dream. Not to have to worry. To be able to do exactly what she wanted. How could she explain how empty she felt — how scared? And how did she dare feel that way when she had what everyone wanted, or thought they wanted?

* * *

“All right, Conal, you’ve had some time to digest this. I need some advice. I need some clarity. I feel so lost.”

“I feel so bad for you.”

She backhanded him lightly on the shoulder. “Shut up.” They were sitting in a noisy tea house near Columbus Circle after his conference duties were over. “I feel like there’s something I should do, but I have no idea what. Should I go to a monastery or an ashram and wait for a sign? Should I travel again, follow my nose like I used to, find more adventures, make more friends, write more books? Should I hang out here and try new things? Dancing, martial arts, violin, all the things I didn’t try as a kid? Immerse myself in a foreign language?”

“Can the bracelet help with things like learning languages?” he asked.

“Naw. I tried wishing I spoke Chinese. Apparently my powers don’t extend to manipulating the human mind.”

“Thank God. I’m not sure I could be your friend if they did.”

“But you see my problem?”

“For God’s sake, Lauren, the world is your oyster. You can do whatever you want.”

“All right, put yourself in my position. If you had this power, what would you do?”

“I would… Hmm…”

“Not so easy when it’s you, is it?”

“I mean, I’d pay off my mum’s house. I’d help a friend in Kosovo start a business. I’d—”

“Of course I’ll do that kind of thing. But that’s for other people. What would you do?”

He looked at her and narrowed his eyes. “I guess I’d need to think about it.”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

“All right, all right, I get it. Most people spend their lives just doing what comes next, whatever they think they have to do. They never have the luxury of an infinite crossroads. I guess evolution didn’t really prepare us for this.”

“No wonder so many movie stars become Scientologists,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing. Look, I thought I knew who I was. I thought I knew what I wanted to do. But now, to be honest, I don’t even know if I want to write anymore.”

“That’d be too bad,” he said. “You’re an amazing writer.”

“It doesn’t seem to matter much. And it’s getting too painful to put everything I have into something and hope to make a difference, and have it rejected over and over.”

“Hmm,” he said sympathetically.

“Look, I know I can’t really call this a problem, compared to real problems,” she said, blushing slightly. “But thought I’d found a calling — a way to contribute to the world that was uniquely mine. Either I was right about that and I blew it, or I was wrong and I have to start over and find a new calling, or I just have to resign myself to a callingless life. And I don’t know how to do that, I don’t know where to start. It’s like I’m on an infinite featureless plain, and there’s no sign pointing in any direction. I’ve been here before, and I made my choices, and it didn’t work out. So how do I know it’ll work out any better if I try again?”

Conal met her anxious eyes. His transparent irises did something funny to her stomach, but it was lost in her agitation. “I understand why you feel this way,” he said in a placating voice that indicated he knew she was being somewhat ridiculous, and he knew she knew it as well. Lauren smiled in spite of herself. “And I don’t think I can talk you out of it right now. But I think a change of scene might do you good. I’m heading to Croatia next week to write about the beaches on a couple of Adriatic islands. You have infinite resources. Want to come?”

She raised an eyebrow, trying to regain her composure. “A puff piece? That’s rare for you.”

“Everyone needs a vacation now and then. What do you say?”

She relaxed her tense frame and sighed. “That sounds nice. But you never answered the question: What would you do if the bracelet were yours?”

He slowly blew air through his lips. “After several months mucking about in Southeast Asia, I suppose I’d think about starting my own newspaper. But I don’t know much about running a paper — ads and publicity and all that. I could hire some good people. But is another paper what the world really needs?” He took a sip of ginger tea. “It’s easy to keep on with my job because I like the people I work with, the pay is enough, the work is really interesting, and it’s all I’m really good at. I don’t even know what I’d do if I got fired, much less if my choices were infinite.” He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

“So you see where I’m at.”

Conal’s eyes smiled. “Come with me to Croatia. We can both think about this some more.”

# # #

To read Chapter Three, click here.

A rough prototype of the cover until I can hire a designer