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Mariel
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November 22, 2012
Between mute submission and blind hate- I choose the third way. I am Samid.

Ten years after Israeli settlers colonizers took their neighbors hostage it was called for the exiled to become Samid in the 1978 Bagdad Conference. What took them so long to acknowledge them? It looked to me like outside permission to admit that their lives were being buried underneath the sands in the hourglass. Ten years late. Samid is Steadfast. Sumud Perseveres. Forty-eight years late. Stay put and repeat three times fast I do believe in spooks. Held under the dismissive gaze of racism and outside the finish line in the sand that is moved further and further away from basic human rights the more that people look away. The third way is the third eye. It is Whitney Houston's dignity. It is wild horses in your head when the paddock holds descended from I broke your father and his father before him. Raja Shehadeh wrote The Third Way in 1980. The epilogue is from 1982, the publication date. Wait two more years.

I recently read another of his books, Palestine Walks. That's a wonderful book that I recommend to all, even if you don't think you would like it. It is like the dying rose that the Beast keeps under glass until true love transforms him back into beauty. Cursed with someone else's dream, starved for your memories that borrows flavor on broken promises of the present and future. I loved it. This year Occupation Diaries was released. I have read that Shehadeh is angrier in the new book. He reads more despairing in The Third Way, as if the self expectation to rise above, to have a place, is more friction for the already over spoken for wheel to ride against. Handlebars and baskets to fly when you forget. You the third wheel all the time because they never leave you alone. The face in the backs of their heads, rather the eyes in back of multiple beheaded monsters, regard them as parasites and feed off of them for everything they've got. In The Third Way what is left to live off of is never enough. The memories are hunger pains. What is it worth to be a Samid, despite them? I felt his frustration when he can't pretend at vicarious post occupation freedom during a cousin fresh from the states visits. The daily treacheries push in again and the samid loses. The third way is a choice between death that you pretend isn't (submission) and death that you pretend you believe will be better on the other side (blind hate). I read in the past in his journals in The Third Way his struggle to live the way of the Samid. I read him need the anger to keep him out of the sleep of complicity. I don't know if I believe that the place (if it is anything other than in between days) of the Samid doesn't eventually lead to one of the others. All three ways go hungry.

Does anyone really own you? The Israelis can and do put in jail at their will. They decide if you can have a home, a job, food in the belly. They haven't yet made them go away (although that 2008 statement from the Israeli minister about another holocaust made me sick and afraid). To be occupied in hopes of the future. To live as an unpleasant thought in the back of another's mind. It's a burden on the back. Samid is enduring to live another day.


Listening to the news and people talk these days about the Israeli airstrikes I wonder if they think that the Palestinians have any other recourse, legal protection or rights. (I guess they still think they have freedom of speech or the right to protest in the usa too. We don't.) "Why can't they handle this peacefully?" I think about abusing a tied up dog until he can't take it anymore and then crying to daddy to shoot the dog when he bites you. I guess they think that the Israelis haven't been brutalizing a people for only a few decades, that the people of the West Bank are not living in a prison. That the election for them to have a say in the UN coming up probably had nothing to do with it, either (of course it had something to do with it). It crushes my heart. I can't take the news pretending this is some sort of fair fight anymore. I did note that in Palestine Walks Shehadeh talks a lot about American support for the "settlements". America isn't mentioned here, although we more than play our part. There's nothing I can do about it, though. It wasn't even mentioned in the recent election that candidate support for Israel was made totally irrelevant by the July 2012 treaty. Voting for Romney or Obama based on who would support Israel more or less was pointless. Israel have all the money, equipment and support that they want. The only thing I can think to do is just not pretending that they are doing anything other than what they are doing. The lies (blatantly obvious as they are were made possible by looking away. Shehadeh himself says that he even can't bear to read the news every day) allowed it to happen. I'm not going to go along with the lie that the occupation ended in 2005, that the conflict is because Palestinians don't want peace, that this whole thing isn't because some of their citizens feel entitled to soul ownership of land from religious writing before anyone was alive. It isn't right and it isn't just. I wish that the Palestinians had rights and legal protection. I wish my government didn't make this possible. What is my third way to deal with that? I wish they had a peaceful means to protest, that the third way was a bearable option. I couldn't live with weighing on their shoulders. I can hardly stomach being open about my feelings about this because I know that it is constant awareness of this and no one would want to hear about it from me, of all people. It's their voicelessness that kills me. I don't know that Shehadeh or anyone else made any more sense about this than any other time someone talks about the thing inside themselves that allows forgiveness. At least it isn't an option, as in an only one. It's your own choice what you can do or live with. It's the between space that turns into complicity or helpless rage. I look for where it would go and I am afraid. I know he doesn't have it from this book. It can't be worn as a position if you have to live a place like Samid. You live behind, on the backs of hands, intimately and slapped. I like that he doesn't pretend. Samid is to persevere in living through that. I did feel from Palestine Walks more the skin stretch from the sides of the head: the Israeli side that takes and the Palestinian side that has no other choice than to give. Is there any way to see both sides at once? To not have to pretend you're alone?


At one stage he said: 'What is this freedom that you think you have? Can you travel abroad without getting a permit from the army? Would you be granted one if you were out of favour with the authorities? Can you buy land, register a company or even get a telephone without the permission of some military officer or other? And everyone is frightened. Scared that if they make the wrong move they will land in jail. Well, I can tell you. At least in prison you are not afraid. You have nothing to lose. It is there that you find the brave men. And it is they who are really free.'


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Liselotte
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April 9, 2022
I came across it at a thrift store and can find very little about the book. Pathetic! Because it is very impressive. I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn't a story, this actually happened.

Well written and very readable. But also tragic.
in the closet

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