Coping

I have three new coping mechanisms:

1) In the morning, I take a taxi for two minutes and pay five dirhams instead of walking to school. I find that by slipping through the streets in the back seat of a turquoise taxi, I can avoid the gazes. I also no longer arrive in the morning dripping in sweat from walking up the 75 rainbow c­­­­­olored stairs of my morning commute.

2) When walking, I count how many comments, looks, and gestures I receive. It somehow has made it more tangible, and also distanced myself from it. "It" is happening to "me" not to the real me. A one-minute walk down the block alone to get money out of an ATM received: 3 verbal engagements, 2 different full-body glances, and 1 time when I considered crossing to the other side of the street.

3) I talk about sexual harassment. I try not to shy away from it. I try not to keep it a shameful secret that is poisoning my day and sucking away all my emotional energy. Tangier is a man’s playground, but I’m not alone in being one of the toys.

Since writing my last post, there have been a few upheavals. 

My host sister read my blog post on Facebook, my host mother and sisters stopped speaking to me for 48 hours straight and glared at me whenever I walked past them to use the bathroom, and I have since moved into a new family.

This is definitely not a situation of clear cut "right" or "wrong." I wrote about my host family and published it on a public platform without telling them nor asking for their permission—something that I am currently reflecting on deeply. Writing “about” can be deeply damaging. It can be a poor reflection of the truth. It is filtered through my own emotional landscape and idiosyncratic perspective. I was living with my host family during summer, when the girls are off from school and relaxing whereas they work hard during the school year. I saw only a sliver of their lives. It caused harm: in a Moroccan context, something that I have had explained to me since then, you do not discuss the private world to the public eye. I hurt my host mother and sisters unintentionally and, in a way, that I never expected. I can only speak for myself. I only ever intended to speak for myself.

Since then, I’ve been stuck in an internal dialogue of questions:

What happens when you write “about” someone as a part of your own personal experience? What happens when you live in a place and feel suffocated by the norm? What happens when you name a problem in a society that is not yours? What happens when that society envelops you and includes you (and therefore excludes you)? How do you move beyond any sort of liberal paralysis that tells you not to speak for others, that you are only a guest in this context, yet you're lead by a gut feeling that something is wrong? And how do you say in Arabic, “It was never my intention to cause any harm”?

Words are immensely powerful. They can both create and destroy: they destroyed a relationship with my host family, and they created a community. Upon posting that piece, a wave of kindness reached out to me: other female friends who have traveled and lived in Morocco echoed similar sentiments, the other women on my program and I began to have many conversations about our experiences, and some of the men on our program have stepped up to be supportive and now walk with me to the cornerstore to buy water without me even asking.

Words destroy. And words create. And so of course, it is now that I return to words. 

I walked into a bookstore searching for Fatima Mernissi’s memoir and was greeted by a curated table of books that were all feminist texts: Simone de Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), the complete works of Fatima Mernissi, Mona Eltahawy’s Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, and other titles that were unfamiliar to me. After absorbing the haven at my fingertips, I meandered over to the woman working in the store and asked her about the book I’m looking for. The sweet woman swapped between French and Arabic with me, telling me that she didn’t have the memoir but suggests that I read Mernissi’s other books. Upon telling her that I’ve read them all, she laughed with her co-worker who said, “She’s read everything!” She then picked up a different book and passed it to me. Les Contes Libertins du Maghreb— “It will make you laugh, and cry. It’s short stories, traditionally oral stories from Moroccan and Algerian women that have been recorded by the author. They are critical but will also amuse you.”

Upon gratefully buying the book, promising to return to report back to her, she asked me and my friend to sit for a coffee outside. We did, and while sipping an espresso, she shared her life story, unprompted by us. Born in a small village in the countryside, her parents tried to marry her to a 50-year-old man. “His son was the same age as me, he was in my class.” She refused, and since then has left her family and lives in the city. She studied literature and now has a master’s degree in Comparative Literature and works in the bookstore. She shared that her sister, the sister that she witnessed being born, is now 20 years old and has two children. One is five years old. Upon doing the math, I repeated back to her in Arabic, “Five years old?” 

“Yes, she was 15 when she was married.”

Her eyes were gleaming with frustration. We began speaking about life for Moroccan women in Tangier specifically, she said it’s much better here than in the village. But it’s still hard. It’s still hard to go out alone places. We made plans to meet again, for a coffee, for a drink, for an exchange of books, for company in a search for solitude.

So, with excitement, I returned home that night and opened up the book. It was wonderfully lewd! It was fabulously crude! It was full of short stories that are repeated around kitchen tables, as jokes, as hearsay, as moral lessons. The author, Nora Aceval, spent over twenty years collecting these oral stories from the Algerian High Plains, where she grew up. 

My favorite story goes like this:

A jealous husband made a list of over 100 potential ruses that his wife can use on him to cheat. An old woman comes to visit the wife and tells her that there are many men—handsome, rich, and kind—who have heard of her beauty and want to be with her. The wife cries out that it is impossible, her husband’s list of tricks is infallible. The old woman laughs and tells her, “He forgets that the list of women’s ruses is infinite.” The old woman then proceeds to help the young woman by throwing dirty water on her one day while her and her husband are walking past her window on the way to the hammam. The old woman apologizes profusely and offers to wash the young woman’s veil. The husband waits outside. Inside the old woman’s house is the most beautiful man, and the young woman and the man cavort while the old woman washes her veil and offers the husband a coffee. 

(Translated summary of Le répertoir, Aceval 2017, pp. 67-69)

The stories break your heart and make you laugh and cry all at the same time. The context that these women find themselves in is not necessarily favorable: traditions dictate limitations that can have violent and disastrous effects on women’s lives (i.e. jealous and controlling husbands, not being a virgin at marriage), but those limits are broken down spectacularly by the ingenuity and humor and trickiness and communal strength of women who assert their power and claim their own space and autonomy. Women find strategies and games and stories to cope with their lives in constricted spaces. We contort, we seek joy, we hold our ground. We are creative, we stretch the limits, we cross borders, we expand together until the world feels big enough to breathe in. We always do. We always will.

My friend at the bookstore was apt with her recommendation. I’ve already returned to buy the second one in the series from her and make plans for another coffee together to discuss feminism in Morocco.

So now, I’m trying to be a vessel of empathy and absorb stories in order to share them—with permission. I’m drawing a boundary between myself and the world around me. It’s how I’m coping.

Solitude

My knees never feel the breeze and my shoulders never see the sun. I walk quickly down the street, footsteps marked with purpose. I focus my gaze elsewhere, avoiding eye contact with strangers. I cross to the other side of the street. I do everything I can to become invisible. By doing so, I become invisible.

And yet, they see me. Maybe it's my eyes that shine with the excitement of new surroundings. Maybe it's my pale skin, a marker that I'm foreign. Maybe it's my playing with a new language, my stuttering over grammatical concepts and guttural sounds. Maybe it's the absence of women sitting in cafés or public restaurants or lounging on the street corners. Maybe I've been infected with the rush in which women walk. Maybe it's "just the way it is," and always will be. Maybe it is only to be expected, to be ignored, to be brushed off. But it begins to seep into me and is leaving fractures and cracks.

Everywhere I go, I am called after, hissed at, shouted at. I try to ignore the eyes that are grazing over my body, regardless of my intentionally conservative dress—nothing showing but my ankles. My eyes focus on the cat napping in the sun as I walk past it, on the bright of the Coca-Cola advertisement at the corner store. I'm grateful at times like these that I do not understand all of the Arabic I hear. But that doesn't matter.

My body does not feel my own. I do not feel my own. My smile falters, my voice fades, and I feel trapped. I cannot walk on the streets alone, I've been told by my host mom. I cannot travel alone, I've been told by the program. I cannot sit in a café alone, I've been told by Moroccan friends. The world started to close in: I have school, the classroom, the garden outside of school, the tense ten minute walk home, and the house. The house is lovely and commanding and reeks of mold and the pressure of a hospitable host mother who is constantly telling me "Eat! Eat!" I do not have a room of my own, I'm starting to go mad.

Classes have not been easier. Some of our male peers are young, brash, and bold. They walk where they want, they study in a cafe alone, they can speak to strangers, they are practicing their Arabic, they are learning about the culture; they are succeeding where we are failing. They do not notice the space they take up in class by speaking, nor do they notice the way the women have shrunk into the shadows of the discussion. They enter the classroom joking about how their male Moroccan language partners taught them how to "play tennis"—as in watching women walk on the street by moving their heads back and forth—and when they laugh, we don't.

All I want to do is disappear. Instead, I find myself shutting down, wanting to shut out, ending conversations with my host mother abruptly because I cannot hear her tell me to eat or to smile or to be happy one more time. I need space for emotions, and to ride the exhaustion that sensitivity incurs; I need space for the anger. But I find that there is no space of solitude for women in Tangier.

I believe that there is always a right book for the moment, you just have to be blessed to find it when you need it. All year Living A Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed sat on my bedside table, waiting for summer break. So, today of all days when I officially shut down and shut out, I began to read it.

Ahmed's words flowed over me like warm water, allowing me feel the calm left over after crying cleansing tears. She weaves together an embodied feminist theory that stems from her own experiences and asks what it means to be feminist, how to find a home in the title, how to constantly question, and how to find ways to enact a life of kindness aimed at dismantling systems of sexism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism (and most importantly, the intersections therein).

"A feminist movement might be happening when a woman snaps, that moment when she decides not to take it anymore, the violences that saturates her world, a world. A feminist movement might happen in the growing connections between those who recognize something—power relations, gender violence, gender as violence—as being what they are up against, even if they have different words for what that what is" (Ahmed, 2017, 3).

I am snapping, will snap, have snapped. This daily barrage and constant commentary by men on the street has undermined my being, my worth. I feel like I'm unraveling and trying to lose my self. This has taken place in only one month.

Can you imagine the impact staring at the ground, avoiding eye contact on the street, has when you have done it your whole life? 

Our Moroccan host sisters are seventeen and twenty-one with thick dark hair that reaches down their spines. They could be twins, and they lounge around the house in matching kandouras (traditional house dresses). They spend the day on Instagram and in front of the mirror applying mixtures of natural items to beautify their skin, their hair, their lips. I've learned that if you put pepper in your hair, it will grow long. If you use rose water on your skin, it will become less red. And if you get married in the summer, you will be divorced by winter. This doesn't stop them from putting on six inch heels to stumble to engagement parties and wedding parties and come home laden with cookies at three in the morning. While one is studying languages and hospitality, and the other wants to be an Instagram model just like every other seventeen year old in the world, I can't help but feel that their lives have already been charted for them. Their parents already bought them houses nearby for when they get married. Not if, when. They will work, and they will be married. They will wear kaftans that glitter and have their family members cheer them and sing to them and follow them with music and drums and happiness. And I wonder what happens when the week-long wedding is over?

I spoke with my twenty-one year old language partner about women in Morocco, or at least I tried to. She is kind and effervescent, but underneath is a seriousness that is masked by youth and undermined by her nervous self-conscious giggles. She is bored this summer, she finished her studies and is waiting to begin a Masters in education. She tells me that her friends get married and she never sees them again. They disappear into their marriages and children and never leave the house. She is beautiful, but hides behind sunglasses because she doesn't think she is. Our conversations feel stilted, not only because of my Arabic, but because of her incapacity to extend beyond the limits of the world as she knows it. She shakes her head when I tell her that my Black friends on the program experience racism, "There is no racism against Blacks in Morocco," she responds. I urge her that there is, I share the story of how a storekeeper refused to let my friend purchase a soda. I share the story of how taxis never stop for them. I tell her I heard about a time that a man hit my friend because she wouldn't high-five him and accept his money after he called her a 'good African.' 

"It's just because of all the refugees in Tangier are from Africa," she says. I realize there is no point in reminding her that Morocco is in Africa. 

"A sensation is often understood by what it is not: a sensation is not an organized or intentional response to something. And that is why sensation matters: you are left with an impression that is not clear or distinct...Feminism often begins with intensity...Over time, with experience, you sense that something is wrong or you have a feeling of being wronged. You sense an injustice. You might not have a word for it; you might not have the words for it; you might not be able to put your finger on it. Feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with the world, a body that is not at ease in a world; a body that fidgets and moves around. Things don't seem right" (Ahmed, 2017, 22).

Something here feels not right. It is a wild world, and some days it feels impossible to ignore the weight of the violence in it and hide behind forced smiles framed in foreign spaces.

"At the time, each time, something happens. You are thrown. These experiences: What effects do they have? What do they do? You begin to feel a pressure, this relentless assault on the senses; a body in touch with a world can become a body that fears the touch of the world. The world is experienced as a sensory intrusion. It is too much. Not to be assaulted: maybe you might try to close yourself off, to withdraw from proximity, from proximity to a potential. Or perhaps you try to deal with this violence by numbing your own sensations, by learning not to be affected or to be less affected...Maybe you adopt for yourself a certain kind of fatalism: these things happen; what happens will happen; whatever will be, will be" (Ahmed, 2017, 23-4).

It is not my place to fight the whole society here. I am here as a guest, a visitor for two months, an explorer in the language, nothing more. But the personal is political. And my personal experience is connected to and a part of a collective experience of women in Morocco. Moroccan women have written about these experiences, particularly Fatima Mernissi in Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women (1991) and Fatima Sadiqi's Women, gender, and language in Morocco (2003). This is nothing new, but the exhaustion is new to me. I want to refuse to ignore the catcalls and learn phrases to yell back in Arabic at the men: Have you no shame? What if I was your sister? What would your mother say? I want to refuse to accept it as is—this should not be the everyday for every woman. I refuse to accept the fatalistic shrugs that say "That's life." But then I find my mouth sewn shut, my eyes flit down again, and I walk quicker, eager to get to my destination and away from the eyes.

There is a bright light in the darkness of every day sexism and racism: my Arabic teacher is a wildfire burning in a dry desert: She shines with joy; she is a dervish of daring and tells us stories of growing up as the only daughter with five brothers; She tells us that she always demanded to be treated the same; She introduces conversations in class about the place of women in Moroccan society.

Today when I asked her where a woman can go to be alone in Tangier, she smiled sadly and shook her head, "There is nowhere." Her sigh of exasperation told me that she looks for that place too. That every woman needs a room of her own.

She tells me about her dreams to be independent, to travel the world alone, to have a house of her own, regardless of what people will say about her, a woman living alone. Then she sighs and says, "It's hard in Morocco to do that as a woman." And in the next breath, she is smiling again and reminding me that everywhere there are hardships. Everywhere has its problems. 

We Are Sumud

72 hours later and I am sitting in a coffee shop back in Jerusalem [a dead quiet Jerusalem, as the 45th President has arrived for his official visit and most roads have been closed off for security].

Yesterday morning I woke up in Bethlehem after 3 hours of sleep after leading a group of international Jews (mainly North Americans) away from the site where the IDF had dismantled our tent.

The day before that I woke up in a sleeping bag on a rock on a hillside being offered coffee from Musa as the sun was rising. Musa had driven 6 hours from Qalqilya the night before to join us at the Freedom Camp. I was offered mulberries to eat and Ahmed was busy fixing me up a sandwich of pita and fresh labneh.

And here I am in this coffee shop, listening to Sam Cooke's “A Change Gonna' Come” being piped through the speakers and trying to think of where to even begin. So, let's begin at the beginning:

20 years ago, Fadel Aamar and his family were pushed off his land in the area known as Sarura, located in the South Hebron Hills, by the Israeli army. The area where his family had lived for generations had been declared an official closed military zone, and was subsequently called Firing Zone 918. Fadel's family's lands were confiscated, his family was intimidated, and they eventually abandoned their home and moved to Yatta (the nearby city where most people living there have a similar story).

Fadel Aamar

Three days ago, Fadel used his key to open the door to his family's cave-home and entered his home again for the first time in twenty years. Three days ago, over three hundred Palestinians, Israelis, and diaspora Jews arrived to Fadel's family lands to be there for him to open his home and return. The joy in the air was palpable as groups propped up a tent on the ruined rock walls of a home from the village of Sarura, as new walls were built, as the cave was cleared of dust and dirt and made habitable. Teams were established to be on clean-up duty and sort out a system for recycling and trash. Other teams were busy preparing the roadway to be repaved to ensure that water could be transported to this remote location and enable quicker transport in an emergency if someone needed to get to a nearby hospital.

I remember walking the hills of South Hebron two years ago (link to that blog post here and a blog post from solidarity action in Susiya and Umm al-Khayr here) and feeling the futility of helping these communities. Ringed on all sides by settlements, what is the point? I remember hearing stories of a cycle of violence between the settlers attacking the Palestinians who continued to live there, and the retributive violence that led one home-owner to be in the hospital leaving his wife all alone in a house in the middle of nowhere. She stood resolutely next to her doorway and said, "I will not leave here, I prefer to die on my lands." I thought to myself that we could draw attention to this family and that maybe they could stay for one more day, and then they would eventually give up and move to Yatta. I could already picture the expansion of the settlement into the valley; I couldn't wrap my head around why this is productive.

But, I spoke to a friend who told me a sentence that has remained ringing in my ears since then: Existence is Resistance. These communities stand at the frontline of occupation and discriminatory policies of violence and land annexation in Area C in the West Bank. They are the most vulnerable communities—often living in remote locations, without access to basic services such as water, electricity, or roads.

They are also, in my eyes, the strongest communities. Adhering to the principle of "Sumud"—roughly translates into English as steadfastness or resilience—they refuse to give up. Homes may be demolished, but they return and rebuild. The army may intimidate them, but they stand up against it. Settlers may attack them, but they return. This is their home.

So, the Sumud Freedom Camp began, in an attempt to join forces together and to oppose the continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, the daily injustices, and to adopt the steadfastness of our Palestinian partners in the fight. The idea was dreamed up by an unprecedented coalition of Palestinian, Israeli, and international organizations and inspired by the Standing Rock camp back in North Dakota, USA: Holyland Trust, Youth Against Settlements, Combatants for Peace, All That's Left Collective, and the Center for Jewish Nonviolence (which included a delegation from the group If Not Now).

The groups adhere to strict principles of nonviolent creative actions to oppose the occupation and to draw attention to the persistent problems of the Israeli Occupation during its 50th year. The intended goals of the Camp were to reclaim Palestinian lands, rebuild ancestral homes, and rehabilitate historic wells. Led by Palestinians in the coalition, this was the largest direct action of diaspora Jews to date.

I arrived to the Camp Friday morning on behalf of the women’s group from Combatants for Peace. We arrived in high spirits astounded to see a large tent of circus-like proportions propped up and surrounded by Palestinian flags. It had been 6 hours since the beginning of the camp and it was still standing. A similar protest action (called Bab al-Shams) had been attempted four years ago and was quickly shut down. I was greeted by hugs and waving hands as friends from all over the world and the region had congregated on this hillside. I was flooded by the feeling of community and pleasantly surprised as many of my worlds collided: a family friend from Denver who had been present at my baby-naming was there as part of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence delegation. Friends from various phases in Jerusalem had returned as well, friends from All That’s Left, and my partners in Combatants for Peace were all present. We came from Jerusalem, from Jericho, from Tel Aviv, from Yatta, from Belgium, from Australia, from Ramallah, from Hebron, from Tarqumia, from Umm al-Kheir. We came together to build the future we want to see.

In the shadow of the Israeli settlement Ma’on, we built tents, we built a community center, we picked up trash, we made walls, we cleared a road, we painted tires to mark the road, we made food, we told jokes, we taught each other our languages, we laughed, we danced, we prayed.

In the shadow of the settlement, on Friday night, the Jewish delegation conducted the Kabbalat Shabbat service as the young Palestinian men connected speakers to the solar-panel generator to blast Arabic music and began dancing around fires.  Standing by the old well, a rabbi conducted the Jewish services to welcome in the Sabbath and the prayers rose to the setting sun. Jews wearing t-shirts that said “End the Occupation” in English, Arabic, and Hebrew sang in Hebrew to the hillsides. Fadel joined the services and sat listening and smiling.

Kabbalat Shabbat as the sun was setting.

The fires were lit, the dancing began, and the smiles abounded.

I stayed up late laughing with a group from Combatants for Peace as Aziz, a member of the movement and an actor, recounted stories and relived moments when he tricked Israeli soldiers into thinking he was a mute so that they wouldn’t stop him, stories that left us quaking in laughter. Inside jokes were made, songs were sung around the fire. I fell asleep with my Palestinian friend Lubna, who is a member of the woman’s group, and my friend Ahmed under the stars keeping an eye out for settlers or army.

The dawn broke, a new day began, and we rubbed the sleep out of our eyes grateful to still be standing. New people came, new work projects began, signs were made to welcome people to the camp, tasks were divvied up and we began.

There were a few instances of settlers approaching from the hillside to check out what was going on below, but they walked away.

The day was productive, and was generally quiet. The sun set, and we were still there. The entire group reconvened and gathered under the big tent to conduct the havdalah ceremony—that which separates the holy from the profane and marks the end of Shabbat and the return to the normal weekday.

A barbecue was announced and fresh chickens were cooked over the fire. We were just laying out mattresses in the big tent when whistles were heard: the army had arrived.

The entire atmosphere changed quickly to one of serious action. Groups were organized: those willing to be arrested went to the front, arms linked, and began to sing songs with Jewish values imbedded in them. The army went straight for the generator; Isa Amro of YAS shouted out “Protect the generator,” a group went towards it to stand between it and then army. A scuffle broke out, an officer hit one of the nonviolent activists, he was pushed to the ground against a table. The generator was taken, the lights went out. The darkness was punctuated by flashlights and the flash on cameras that were filming all. Live streams were uploaded. The singing switched to chants, “The World is Watching YOU” as the tents were dismantled. Under the cover of darkness, the IDF arrived and took away all the buildings, supplies, and necessary materials. The group was threatened with tear gas and pepper spray. Palestinians and Jews sat in the middle of the tent as they were dismantling it, singing, chanting, and refusing to leave.

The army left, no arrests were made. No serious assaults, no broken bones, no tear gas, no skunk water, no rubber bullets, no stun-guns, no live fire: none of the usual methods against Palestinian activists were used. The group reconvened, reckoning with their privilege as Jews and the way in which their bodies were protected and how that protection was extended to the Palestinians present as well.

I was with the group that had opted to not be arrested, and at a certain point we had decided it was best to leave in case a closed military zone was declared and the army would then begin arresting everyone who was there. We led the group to the nearby village, which had partnered with the action, and then organized buses to return to the group’s home base in Bethlehem. 3 hours later, I was awake and trying to find a way back to the camp. I had to go back, I had to see my friends, I had to know that they were okay. Those who had remained behind had stayed the night were left without tents, without mattresses (the army had poured water over many of the mattresses and blankets to make them unusable) and without water.

A few hours later, I returned with my women from CFP women’s group, bouncing over the rocks of the road in a car with Ali Abu-Awwad, of Roots, and Suli Khattib, one of the founders of Combatants for Peace. The camp had been relocated, and it had been rebuilt. Fadel and his family were moving into their cave home, his wife was making fresh bread over a fire for the first time in twenty years. The group was gathered under the tent as Fadel, beaming, welcomed us into his home. The sleep-deprivation was worth it.

I remained for the day yesterday as a new tent was rebuilt, as we sat and laughed and hugged, and were rejuvenated by each others’ presence. We returned, we rebuilt, we are resilient. We are Sumud. 

Please follow this project as it continues and expands via sumudcamp.org, and the hashtag #WeAreSumud. It is day 4 of the camp, and we are still there. However we need help to keep going and to make the space sustainable for the families of Sarura to return!

If you are in the region, please consider joining a shift and being at the camp, either in the day or during the night. Rides are being organized from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to get there. Please be in touch with me if you are interested or want to know more about how to get there. Having internationals, Israelis, and Jews there is incredibly helpful and provides a buffer of safety from the IDF for our Palestinian partners.

If you are abroad, we need monetary support! We need money to replace the generator that was taken, to buy the supplies to rehabilitate the wells, and to support the families in their efforts to rebuild. Follow this link here to donate to the crowdfunding of this project.

Follow #WeAreSumud online:

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Why We March

Yesterday, the world rose up. 673 women-led marches sprung up from Antarctica to Washington.

The internet is teeming with images and text and videos and songs and memes and today, the day after, here comes the analysis.

I was unable to attend the march in my body (wisdom teeth removal, so a weekend of ultimate self-care filled with ice cream and binge watching of ‘The Crown’). But, I sat at home in Jerusalem, glued to my computer and my phone. Flicking between live-feeds, instant photos, news reports, friends’ text messages from D.C. and L.A. and New York and Tel Aviv, my mom’s photos from Denver, and Facebook: the energy was palpable. Even now, I close my eyes and see images of sign bearing, grinning women and men, pink hats, and crowds that do not end.

Hundreds of thousands of feet marching, walking, dancing, prancing, chanting, singing, yelling, smiling, laughing, traveling with a message.

Hundreds of thousands of feet from coast to coast, from continent to continent, marching with a purpose: to be heard.

The beauty of yesterday is the ultimate diversity of ideas and values that were brought together by a banner of inclusivity: equality, climate change, Black Lives Matter, access to abortion, wage-difference, indigenous rights, LGBTQIA rights and recognition; no to DAPL, to misogyny, to corruption, to rape culture, to separation of undocumented families; yes to embracing of Muslim communities, to standing against Occupation, to healthcare, to access to education, and to organizing unions. The issues brought to the streets were vibrant, were passionate, and were diverse—just like the lived experiences of every single person who was marching.

I watched the main stage in D.C. as an indigenous woman opened the ceremony with a song from her tradition, as black women sang their hopes and fears, as women took up space, as the past of feminism collided with today in all its glory. I listened with baited breath to role models Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem and began to repeat the names of new women who will lead us into tomorrow: Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and the countless others who worked to make yesterday possible.

Yesterday was not just a march; it is a movement. Women of color are on the front-lines, they are speaking from the stage; it is time to listen.

I think back to that glorious day in October when 20,000 people marched to Jerusalem under the banner of Women Wage Peace (I wrote about it here on Jerusalem Post, and here on my blog). There is something radical about the love of women extending to all, across all borders, all political ideologies, all divisions. That love is frightening to some who do not wish to see a new order, a new world, a new day dawn. It is wildly powerful and exciting.

But in order for a movement to rise, to grow, to monitor, to transform, it must keep working. That anger that fires up and inspires one woman who has never joined a protest before to get on a plane and pick up a sign, that anger cannot dissipate because we marched and yelled and screamed for one day. That anger must continue, must charge forward, must motivate to picking up the phone tomorrow, or committing to attending a meeting, or deciding to run for office, or deciding to start that uncomfortable conversation with ourselves about oppression. We must wake up every day and challenge our previous conceptions of where we are from and where we are going.

The movement begins again today. March on.

Women Wage Peace, March of Hope, Jerusalem, October 2016

Something Broke.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. -Common Sense, Thomas Paine, 1776.

Something broke last week and a deep grief set in. I was surprised by the heaviness of my mourning. Hillary Clinton’s climactic denouement and Donald Trump’s decisive rise to power has left me spinning in an emotional tidal wave. I wake up in the morning and my limbs feel heavy. My heart hurts. My brain races and runs. My instinct is to throw the covers over my head and hide away, to play soothing music and close the blinds and sit in darkness.

I’m not surprised, I’m not shocked.  But I am sad. Tears bubble up again as I relive watching Hillary Clinton’s concession speech. To be a young woman watching her stand with poise and grace under the most unimaginable emotional duress, I was inspired by her bravery. I sat there broken by the realization that very idea of a woman running the country could be so divisive and elusive. I watched her standing tall and I was deeply moved by her as she spoke about dedicating her life to public work and challenging all those young women watching to do the same with their lives. To fight for what is right.

Yet—it is hard to bounce back from watching a woman come so close, yet still be unable to attain the highest-office, the symbolic house that equates the highest power in our world. It is with this heavy heart that I went to Beit Jala this weekend for a continuing seminar with the women activists of Combatants for Peace. I was emotionally burnt out and exhausted, yet I knew I had committed to the process and so I went.

Sixteen of us arrived: Palestinian and Israeli women ages ranging across multiple generations. Speaking no common language, we picked up our headphones and tuned into translations of Arabic and Hebrew and English. We were shy at first, reserved. We have already met once as a whole group, and other times amongst our “national-groups.”

Those meetings have been, interesting but uneventful.

This weekend was different. We worked together to make a timeline of the history of the conflict, we shared our personal timelines, and we discussed what makes a moment important. We discussed how being a woman colors our experiences, we discussed how being women could be a strategy in resistance; we discussed what leadership in the movement looks like and could look like. We opened up, we laughed, we shared cookies.

But most important, we marched. Every month, Combatants for Peace organizes a march alongside Rte. 60 (I have written about it before here). The march fell exactly during our weekend workshop, so we went. The point of this group is to plan actions amongst the women in the Combatants for Peace organization and to highlight the role that gender plays in conflict. As a group, we said, “Let’s do something special at the march…” but we didn’t know what to do.

We arrived at the meeting point. The march began as it normally does, the crowd mills around. Signs are handed out and passed around. Friends say hello and hug. The soldiers pace back and forth.

But as we actually began marching, suddenly it clicked. We found each other, linked arms, and pushed our way to the front. We led the crowd. Women standing together against the Occupation. We held the sign of Combatants for Peace: “There is another way.” We held the front. We chanted cheers, and as the routine phrases were shouted through the microphone we feminized them in Hebrew and Arabic. We picked up the megaphone and led cheers, lending women’s voices to the hullabaloo.

I shouted with all of my heart. I screamed with all of the emotions that this week has left me: desperation, fear, hurt, anxiety, anger, confusion, and determination. I was lifted up this weekend by the voices of the women. I was healed by our conversations, our kindness, our dedication, our indignation at injustice, our work. Women have a role to play and we will not be silenced.

The fight for justice is one that rages every single day all over this planet, from Israel and Palestine to the United States. The great experiment that is the United States is not yet finished—we are living and breathing and actualizing it every single day.

We are the people we have been waiting for. We are the voices of our time. And the time is now.

So what do we do on a day like today? A day that feels dark and foreboding and full of tyrannical elimination of freedoms that the generations before fought for? A day that feels as though the very pillars of our illusions of democracy are crumbling? A day that feels out of control?

We return to our core values. We find strength in our local communities. We re-read those documents that inspire, bring strangers together, and bind us to a shared destiny. We re-read the Bill of Rights. We re-read the Constitution. We stand by it and awaken to protect it. We support those who do (like the ACLU).

Something broke, so now we build.

Let’s get to work.