I have started to take vitamine B12. I went to see Dr.Getulio to know how I was. He was amazed. He a non believer considered my recovery a miracle. He attributed it to my enormous desire to live. That seemed funny.

So I asked him about vitamine B12. Did it work against mosquitoes? Obviously he asked me why I was asking that. I told him, what I have always told, it is because I want to leave Sao Paulo. He knew that.

Jules, where on earth are you going this time?

Deep breath… he knew I was about to go back to Asia, and also that there was nothing he could say against it.

So I guess, he was surprised that because my family were so concerned that I wanted to return to the place where I almost died I changed my plans.

” The AMAZON!””

“Julieta, I hope you take me also as a friend now. Take B12, but also take the whole B complex. I never understand why you like these places!”

“Getulio it is the most amazing ecosystem on earth! How can you not understand that? Every time they take a new sample more than half of it is of things they do not know! Does B complex work?”

“It is true. It is beautiful. What can I say, I always prefer you are close. But go! Enjoy it. It is beautiful! B complex works!.””

And so for the past weeks I have been planning my trip. Alone, as I have learned that it is better to trust those you have met on the path.

Of course, he asked me when I would return. And I was honest.

“I have no idea. ”

The reality is that I have a vague sketch in my mind. But I am realistic enough to know I know nothing of the north, nor of the northeast of Brasil. I could get tired of the humidity and the heat in a day. I could get sick. I could wish to fly back home anytime.

I know many people get concerned. And I am thankful, but I need to go. Even more importantly I need to discover this country were I was born in and know so little of.

Most people who wonder the world know way better some countries they visit than they know their own. So, I want to know this one a bit better.

Someone told me these days something I always think about. Through the path you hear things and sometimes you don’t understand them fully. Much later you do.

I became buddhist last year. I never speak of that really because I did not plan it, and I consider I know so little of Buddhism. Yet, I had the priviledge to sit in front of HH Dalai Lama, Karmapa and Lingtrul Rinpoche.

Rinpoche explained just before he called me to become Buddhist

“A Lama does not accept anyone to be their followers. When someone comes to a Lama he looks, and he says yes or no. When they say no, it does not mean they dislike the person.”

Tibetans have a very different conception of life. They believe in many lives. They believe in the non existence of self. More importantly they believe once you say yes to someone, all of their actions will be theirs. So they observe and when they say yes they believe that all of their actions will be interconnected.

I don’t believe they say yes to people they feel are perfect, rather to those who are in a path to become better people. I understand that to be better, it is not to be rich, or successful, etc. It means to be more compassionate, more responsible of their actions, more patient.

That day I heard it and was moved by it. Yet I believe it only belonged to Lamas. Suddenly I realised it did not.

I have said Yes to all that has come towards me. I have felt betrayed, abandoned, hurt. Yet, one day I understood I should simply import, care for those who search a better path, a more compassionate path, a more patient one.

I also realised that I had to say no to many things. I realised that saying no was sometimes more compassionate than to say yes. I understood that things had to be differentiated. As they say “to recognise things for what they really are”.

I have kept lots of people aside on that decision. Which does not mean I wish them harm, I simply do not want to be entangled. But ironically this decision never came from selfishness, yet from a deep desire to not contribute to even more negative synapses in the world for the other.

I also understood that there was a great difference between guilt and responsibility.

More profoundly I understood that I was responsible for all that has happened to me. I even lament the fact that I have put my ex-boyfriend in a position that made him be his worse version.

I used to pray to die. Now I pray that if I am ever in his place that I should be stronger, more compassionate. I never imagined that would happen but today I feel compassion towards him. I am sorry I have put so many in so grave emotional state.

Yet I discovered that we are always responsible for whatever that we feel. Abandoning this responsibility, blaming the other is the greatest loss we can endure.

I am sure many of you might get this email and immediately get concerned. Why alone. Where are you going? What are really your plans.

Alone because I need to. I ll start in Manaus, and from there I have no idea. I ll attempt to write from my phone like now. I will attempt to discover what is that unites these people we actually do not know. Maybe on the path I ll rediscover what makes me from here.

with love,

Jules

Little stories move me sometimes way more than serious political events that take place everyday.

So I will refrain from talking about the elections in my country to tell a small story that happened these days when I went for my typical saturday lunch with my grandmother and both the story and the reaction towards it taught me a lot.

It was suddenly summer here! I ordered tea thinking of the people from the desert and Asia that had told me to not drink anything to cold in the heat. And my 90 year old grandmother ordered her caipirinha. ( lemon, ice and either cachaca, vodka or sometimes sake.)

After the natural confusion of bringing alcohol to me and tea to my grandma, I decided to go to the toilet to wash my hands touched by the lemon of her drink.

I went up and I saw a little boy. I did not say anything when I went in, but as I came out, he was still there standing by the stairs.

“What are you doing? Are you hiding?”
I said jokingly

Quietly, he said no.

“Playing.?”

“No.”

I was intrigued and wondering what could he could possibly be doing so quietly and alone in the empty second floor.

“Come on tell me. I am so curious.”

“Ok. I am just here. Not playing, not hiding. I am waiting.”

“Oh. I see, you are waiting for someone who is inside.”

“No. I am waiting to see how long it will take for my mother to notice that I have disappeared. I don’t think she misses me.”

I was so taken aback by these words. He was literally in silence for a long time.

“What is your name?. How old are you ? I think you are 7. And I am sure that your mom thinks either you are in the bathroom or playing. I am 100% certain she is letting you play. Who is she with?”

“Pedro. You are right I am 7. But you are wrong she is with her girlfriend and she forgot I exist.”

I still talked to him for a while. Sweet boy as hell. And went down to look for his mother and her friend.

Found her.

“Excuse me, are one of you Pedro’s mother.?”

“Oh my god, yes did he do something wrong, anything to you?”

“No. He is lovely. But he has been there for a while waiting to see if you have noticed he has disappeared. I would encourage you to go find him and say you have been missing him.”

She was completely taken back by these words, she thanked me, told me she had no idea, and went after him.

I told my grandmother about it, and she said:

“This goes to show how hard it is to be a parent. How much abandonment a little child can feel. And shows why it is not surprising they later become closer to their nannies than to their mothers. Poor boy, poor mother.”

They came to say goodbye when they left.

I told this story to a few people. Some people immediately thought about the child, some others went as far as saying

“Poor mother she also has her own life.”

The capacity to put your own life before a little child’s, one’s child, shocks me.

And so I remembered a phrase I heard these days

“If you want to know about the other, do not focus on how they speak about themselves but rather focus on how they speak about others.”

Little stories teach you profound things about how to react towards the world. In election time or not.

Ps: as I just read this story to my grandma she said:

“It is way worse for the child. Who is a child. Who feels it strongly, and might in a few years not remember about it consciously, but it will be there and later on they will become the most severe judges of their own parents.”

Things that seem little to you sometimes have profound effect on one’s life.

That is why we should probably choose positive actions and words. We might not even realise but we are building reality.

I just found out two of these apparently small acts that have changed lives.

About a year ago, Nininha the lady who works here in our house, told me she was suffering. Her child ate nothing, and was afraid of going out.

My dear friend Rafaela was here. Rafaela studied both anthropology and psychology. She worked with the indigenous people of the Amazon. I asked her whether she could talk to Nininha. And, naturally did she did. Apart from profound knowledge that came from Universities. She has something which I find way more important. She is compassionate and non judgemental.

“Nininha, do you eat with your child? Do you spend time with her?”

“No Rafaela, I make the food and put it there. After a whole day working in so many houses I sit to rest and watch tv.”

“Nininha, try to ask her to cook with you. Make of it a game. Turn off the TV and sit with her.”

I had not heard from Erika, Nininha’s daughter, till these days. We naturally talked about several things but she did not talk about it, and I did not ask.

I didn’t ask because I had forgotten it, but simply because I have learned to let people tell me what they want, rather than interrogating anyone.

Some people might even take it to be self-absorption, non caring etc. Most of my close friends I hope should know I wait for them to talk and then ask when they talk about it.

So I was in the kitchen when Nininha told me out of the blue.

“You know, since I started to follow everything your friend told me it all changed.”

“Wow! You really do it? Does she eat now? Is she more confident?”

“Yes. I follow all that she said and it is really important.”

I was so moved.

Today I woke up and called a friend to go climbing. She sent me a message saying.

” I can’t, but have a good day”.

So as I was in the kitchen I recorded a message saying “Good morning, and asked Cre and Raquel, who work here to say Good morning to her too”

We did it laughing.

My friend sent a message back saying: ” You always wake up happy!”

As usual my mind flew back to Asia. More precisely to India. I woke up in my usual happiness then and my friend said.

“What did you just say? How can you always wake up cheerful ?”

“I said “Bom dia sol! Which means good morning Son!”

“What do you say when there is no Sun?”

” I know you might find it silly. But I say good morning cloud, or rain.?”

I obviously had stopped saying that when I was sad, sick, tired of life.

But today when we received the message of my friend saying

“You always wake up cheerful”

I remembered and said while I was in the kitchen

“It is because I have already wished Good morning to the Sun. 🙂

I never knew where it had come from. And then Cre told me

“I taught you.”

And I remembered it! Cre was my nanny when I was born. She hid under my bed to sleep with me so that no one would know simply because I was afraid.

She left us when I was 6. I never forgot Cre.

When I came back to Brazil last year almost dead my grandmother jandyra, who is very spiritual told my father “you must call Cre to take care of her. She was the first person to do so.”

When I got better, my grandmother Lucia, with whom I live with did not want to let Cre go.

She worked before with my other grandmother.

When I went to my Neurologist last week he told me

“I am not religious but your case is a miracle! Give rest to your Guardian Angel. In my career nothing has moved me so much as this. Your desire to live is just amazing.”

I naturally told him he could not ask me to spare a being he did not believe in 🙂 and that for a long time I prayed to die.

Maybe that desire was non-conscious everything fights to live. That is why the sparing of non necessary information, betrayal was crucial.

I am thankful to all of you who read this. All of you who have prayed, all who have taken care of me. I am eternally thankful.

We change the world in a daily basis. I l feel I will be forever buddhist, and forever respecting of all the other religious people and none religious ones who attempt in a daily basis to build a more compassionate world.

And I am conscious that my daily happiness in the morning has origin! It is because I was taught to say good morning to the sun. Rafaela should know that Erika eats better now because of her.

We all should be more conscious of the impact we have on the other.

Love, from Brazil

It is september 2014. Last year I almost died in September. My friends were told by someone I once trusted that I was gone. Cognition had left me. Julieta as you knew does no longer exist.

And that is true. In that year the first thing my neurologist dr. Getulio Daré Rabello saw it was me and I was lost. He looked at me with preoccupied face. They did not fully understand though I could not speak I could hear, I could think and I was trapped inside my brain.

Dr. Getulio was so kind and attempted to treat me normally, while I could not focus my mind nor eyes. He forbade my parents to give me information that was sent to my friends. I would suffer too much. And he told me “julieta, try to write! You have studied so much, you must try to write.”

I will be forever thankful for these words! The sparing of pain when I could not take it, and to trust I could write again.

And so I did. It was so hard. I could not remember words, I could not understand a screen, I had lost categories. I was lost alone inside of my brain.

But I did it. I fought for the wrong reason to live. But still I did it. I had the massive support of my parents, grandmother, my brother. I had friends praying for me in Palestine and Israel. In Europe. I had my dearest professors Mustapha and Marcelo in a battle. I had people from every single continent writing me, praying and hoping. Above all I had some people of my family and friends who simply did not believe I was gone.

To be totally honest when I realised how betrayed and abandoned by someone I mistakingly and non-wisely trusted I lost all hope.

It did not matter if everybody told me how educated I was, how much I could give to the world. I simply had internally quit the world. I did not feel like trusting anything anymore. I prayed every night to die. Not to be sick again, simply to die. And I have no problem in saying this to anyone.

One day someone who had been in a war, and someone else who had been tortured told me.” What you have gone through is worse than what I have lived. I was tortured by my enemy. I had never expected anything good from him. Everybody has the same amount of pain in life.” “You must not let it go inside.” “You must see things for what they are.” “Any harm inflicted on you is your own fault you allowed it.”

I understood and still I could barely want to live. I had been defeated from inside. I had pain in my whole body.

Then I started reading Buddhism. It freed me. It calmed me down. It did not give me any desire to do anything. But I did stop praying to die.

I re-encountered music. Benjamim Taubkin and Penezzi were instrumental in giving me some pure advice.

Then I started to climb and was confronted with my lost flexibility. So, I came to the beach.

I came alone and stayed under the sun and under the rain. Never moved by anything. I started my daily process of healing my body. I did yoga, I swam, I meditated. I regain total movement. I understood my brain way better than I ever did.

Last night I sat with Nil. The daughter of Anisia ( the lady who takes care of our beach house).

How many years had passed since I had done this! No idea.

“Nil, I was meditating today and it came to my mind I was racist towards you when I was a child. I am so sorry.!”

“You? Are you sure? I don’t remember. We played the whole time you, mirela and I.”

“I am sure. I was racist! I said something about you being black!”

“I really dont remember. I remember we made sweets to sell in the beach, we made plans, we sold perfume we made with plants. Oh. There was one day you did not let mirela go inside the pool. And she cried!”

“Why? And she is white than it was not racist, right?

“You were not racist! You did not let her go inside the pool bc she had hurt her leg and it would pollute it :)”

“My god. That is horrible! What did you say?”

“Nothing. You were the owner of the pool.”

“Dear lord. I was classicist!!!!”

“We played the whole time. The three of us. We had fights and went back to playing seconds after. We had lots of fun. I guess we were cruel to your brother!

“True! But he was annoying :)”

I bid goodbye and went to my huge house alone while Anisia and Nil stayed in theirs. I closed the door thinking. “there is something absurd in this situation”.

I woke up the sun was fighting to appear. I meditated and as usual while I practiced yoga here I sang mantras, and I always touch the sea and I ask for liberation for all suffering to all that I know, all that i have touched, to all that is sentient being.

I ask to all beings protection from Buddha, God, YHWH, Allah, Krishna, Tara, Karmapa, Dalai lama, Jesus, Nossa Senhora da Paz, to high spiritual beings that came from Africa, indigenous peoples of Americas that have disappeared without me ever knowing their names. I look at the sea and think of Yemanja. I look at the sun and think of the words of lama Michel when talking about all that causes dopamine released in the brain. Drugs, alcohol, sex, chocolate etc

“such euphoria is suffering in disguise.”

I seat under the sun and feel the heat. The joy. The peace. I smile thinking in my prayer which is essentially Brazilian, the incorporation of all without the need to let anything out.

And deep down I know even this total wellbeing is transitory it is impermanent, and that is ok.

I seat and write this from my phone. Dr. Getulio was right. I must write. And I also know my soul while working in being present will always fly east.

Love, Julieta

I have a deep conection with the mekong. More precisely to my friends who I have met seing the sunset in the Mekong. How many thousands pictures could one take, how many painters have attempted to capture it?

They feel to me always like the shadows of plato’s cave. Some are naturally more beautiful, than others… yet they are still shadows.

I made a friend in a bus, just like I did before all over the world. She told me she was supposed to avoid the sun and that she had started a daily war with her own fear. She took pictures of the sunrise.

I have ever since attempted to see the sun rise here by the beach. It never really worked. Till today.

Just like any other day I could not see the sun rise. I sat on the sand and observed there was light. I did not know where it came from. I looked aound thinking: above the clouds in every plane you can see it is sunny. But where was the sun now?

I sat hearing the waves and suddenly I could see a pinkish, red “thorn” fighting to slide, glide penetrate the clouds. It was a long battle.

And suddenly I realised I could not antissipate the victory of the sun unless I looked that in fact it was all over lit. I could finally see it, when I looked at the sea. There he was. There he was clearer than in the sky. There he was.. The sun!

My mind naturally wondered back to Asia. Chinese medicine. Never tackling the exact point. It is in the reflection of all that is around that you can see the whole.

Not much longer, with all that needed to be lit already lit, with all clouds mysteriously disappearing I saw the bright yellow sun in the sky.

“The wordl that is deeply inside of one cannot be the reflection of the world that is outside. Aware and conscious of that outside world, the world that is inside should search permanency in the impermanency of all that is around.
In fact, the world that is inside cannot mix “permanency” with rigidity and lack of movement. Amidst the impermanence of it all, and the internal effort to be permanent, it is always fundamental to fully understand TAO, the path. It is fundamental to take the path. Not any path, but a conpessionate one.”

I had so many answers to my last email about what my friends from Gaza, Israel and the west bank were writing, posting in my wall that I was impressed. Some people I never dreamed would be on facebook and are. The battle was being fought there, or more likely some
Conversation was possible, and the exposition was more absolute. Yet others, thanked me and asked me to tell more here..

First I must confess that maybe with some desire to fleeing my life I decided to go to a buddhist retreat in silence for 10 days. I barelly did not tell anyone I would be unreachable for 11 days. I disappeared from the net, from all that was happening in my life and in the life of my friends.

I got sick on day one, high fever, sleeping till 4 am everyday. Eating only at 6 and 11. After that, only water with lemon for those who had done it before. I had done it before, and I dont mind so much not eating but cold in a open space, fever, and no food, medicine in an open stomach were by the 3rd day an obvious path dounhill in my body.

I kept hearing next to me new people getting sick, coughing, sneezing and I could not sleep. And it was not the fever, nor the noise, nor the open cracks with chilly wind that kept me awake.

It was my total awareness that I had not told my friends in the mide east about it. It was my total awareness that a war was being fought, that my friends would have written me and I was there meditating. Incapable to write to anyone.

I once read my friend saying that abandoning a situation to feel better was the priviledge of the rich. Maybe it is even more than that it might simply be the path of the weak.

I am not a soldier, I am not there, yet there in the total silence all that I thought about was the film Amit had sent me, the words Yassert had told me.

I left the retreat. I did not know exactly where to go. I did not feel like going home. My phone, once returned to me had many messages of people of the middle east from obviously from both sides of the wall.

I came to the beach alone, to be in my house alone and quiet, I wanted to be able to reply. To know how they were.

I was gone for 3 days… And when I was able to talk to my friend from Gaza who lives in Colombia he told me, he could not reach anyone from his family, or friends. They were all dead. I sat alone in my house and cried. I do not know these people, but I felt the pain and I felt the total despair, loss and anger from where before there was hope for peace. It had become his personal fight. I cried.

We can’t be loosing the moderate in all sides. What can one do in front of such brutality? What possible reason people can find to keep going and to justify the bombing of an open prison, killing soo many children, who are the majority of that population?

I was also not capable to speak to other palestinians in the westbank. why? Was the internet gone? Were they all gone?

Filled with terror, I decided to look the paper. I do not trust the paper. The images of the leaders of the Shin Bet in the documentary The Gatekeepers kept comming to my mind… “No morality”. Even THEY knew they had walked the wrong path.So I searched one of the men I most trust in Israel. He had just written

Uri Avnery…

Uri Avnery was born in 1923. He survived the holocaust, was part of the Irgun, the Knesset, and was also the first jewish Israeli to meet with Arafat. He has been for years an avid critic of the Israeli government, a post-zionist and and a prolific writer. He is vilified in Israel by many. But since he fought for the Irgun and survived the holocaust, most people cant really criticise him so they say that he simply lost his mind bc of his age. Even if his fight has been happening for decades…

These are his words from today… They could be mine.. These is what feels to see a war from both sides…

Meeting in a Tunnel
02/08/14

THERE WAS this village in England which took great pride in its archery. In every yard there stood a large target board showing the skills of its owner. On one of these boards every single arrow had hit a bull’s eye.

A curious visitor asked the owner: how is this possible? The reply: “Simple. First I shoot the arrows, and then I draw the circles around them.”

In this war, our government does the same. We achieve all our goals – but our goals change all the time. In the end, our victory will be complete.

WHEN THE war started, we just wanted to “destroy the terror infrastructure”. Then, when the rockets reached practically all of Israel (without causing much damage, largely owing to the miraculous anti-missile defense), the war aim was to destroy the rockets. When the army crossed the border into Gaza for this purpose, a huge network of tunnels was discovered. They became the main war aim. The tunnels must be destroyed.

Tunnels have been used in warfare since antiquity. Armies unable to conquer fortified towns tried to dig tunnels under their walls. Prisoners escaped through tunnels. When the British imprisoned the leaders of the Hebrew underground, several of them escaped through a tunnel.

Hamas used tunnels to get under the border walls and fences to attack the Israeli army and settlements on the other side. The existence of these tunnels was known, but their large numbers and effectiveness came as a surprise. Like the Vietnamese fighters in their time, Hamas uses the tunnels for attacks, command posts, operational centers and arsenals. Many of them are interconnected.

For the population on the Israeli side, the tunnels are a source of dread. The idea that at any time the head of a Hamas fighter may pop up in the middle of a kibbutz dining hall is not amusing.

So now the war aim is to discover and destroy as many tunnels as possible. No one dreamed of this aim before it all started.
If political expedience demands it, there may be another war aim tomorrow. It will be accepted in Israel by unanimous acclaim.

THE ISRAELI media are now totally subservient. There is no independent reporting. “Military correspondents” are not allowed into Gaza to see for themselves, they are willingly reduced to parroting army communiqués, presenting them as their personal observations. A huge herd of ex-generals are trotted out to “comment” on the situation, all saying exactly the same, even using the same words. The public swallows all this propaganda as gospel truth.

The small voice of Haaretz, with a few commentators like Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, is drowned in the deafening cacophony.

I escape from this brainwashing by listening to both sides, switching all the time between Israeli TV stations and Aljazeera (in Arabic and in English). What I see is two different wars, happening at the same time on two different planets.

For viewers of the Israeli media, Hamas is the incarnation of evil. We are fighting “terrorists”. We are bombing “terror targets” (like the home of the family of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh). Hamas fighters never withdraw, they “escape”. Their leaders are not commanding from underground command posts, they are “hiding”. They are storing their arms in mosques, schools and hospitals (as we did during British times). Tunnels are “terror tunnels”. Hamas is cynically using the civilian population as “human shields” (as Winston Churchill used the London population). Gaza schools and hospitals are not hit by Israeli bombs, God forbid, but by Hamas rockets (which mysteriously lose their way) and so on.

Seen through Arab eyes, things look somewhat different. Hamas is a patriotic group, fighting with incredible courage against immense odds. They are not a foreign force oblivious to the suffering of the population, they are the sons of this very population, members of the families that are now being killed en masse, who grew up in the houses that are now being destroyed. It is their mothers and siblings who huddle now in UN shelters, without water and electricity, deprived of everything but the clothes on their back.

I have never seen the logic in demonizing the enemy. When I was a soldier in the 1948 war, we had heated arguments with our comrades on other fronts. Each insisted that his particular enemy – Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian – was the most brave and efficient one. There is no glory in fighting a depraved gang of “vile terrorists”.

Let’s admit that our present enemy is fighting with great courage and inventiveness. That almost miraculously, their civilian and military command structure is still functioning well. That the civilian population is supporting them in spite of immense suffering. That after almost four weeks of fighting against one of the strongest armies in the world, they are still standing upright.

Admitting this may help us to understand the other side, something that is essential both for waging war and making peace, or even a ceasefire.

WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING the enemy or having a clear concept of what we really want, even achieving a ceasefire is an arduous task.

For example: what do we want from Mahmoud Abbas?

For many years the Israeli leadership has openly disparaged him. Ariel Sharon famously called him a “plucked chicken”. Israeli rightists believe that he is “more dangerous than Hamas”, since the naïve Americans are more likely to listen to him. Binyamin Netanyahu did everything possible to destroy his standing and sabotaged all peace negotiations with him. They vilified him for seeking reconciliation with Hamas. As Netanyahu put it, with his usual talent for sound bites, “peace with us or peace with Hamas’.

But this week, our leaders were feverishly reaching out to Abbas, crowning him as the only real leader of the Palestinian people, demanding that he play a leading role in the ceasefire negotiations. All Israeli commentators declared that one of the great achievements of the war was the creation of a political bloc consisting of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates and Abbas. Yesterday’s “no-partner” is now a staunch ally.

The trouble is that many Palestinians now despise Abbas, while looking with admiration upon Hamas, the shining symbol of Arab honor. In Arab culture, honor plays a far larger role than in Europe.

At the moment, Israeli security experts look with growing concern at the situation in the West Bank. The young – and not only the young – seem ready for a third intifada. Already, the army fires live ammunition at protesters in Qalandia, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and other places. The number of dead and injured in the West Bank is rising. For our generals, this is another reason for an early ceasefire in Gaza.

CEASEFIRES ARE made between the people who are firing. Viz: Israel and Hamas. Alas, there is no way around it.

What does Hamas want? Unlike our side, Hamas has not changed its aim: to lift the blockade on the Gaza Strip.

This can mean many things. The maximum: opening the crossings from Israel, repairing and reopening the destroyed airport of Dahaniyah in the south of the Strip, building a seaport at Gaza City (instead of the existing small fishing jetty), allowing Gaza fishermen to go further from the coast.

(After Oslo, Shimon Peres fantasized about a big harbor in Gaza, serving the entire Middle East and turning Gaza into a second Singapore.)

The minimum would be to open the Israeli crossings for the free movement of goods in and out, allowing Gazans to go to the West Bank and beyond, and to support themselves with exports, an aspect which is too rarely mentioned.

In return, Israel would certainly demand international inspection to prevent the building of new tunnels and the restocking of the arsenal of rockets.

Israel would also demand some role for Abbas and his security forces, which are viewed by Hamas (and not only by them) as Israeli collaborators.

The Israeli army also demands that even after a ceasefire comes into force, it will complete the destruction of all the known tunnels before withdrawing.

(Hamas also demands the opening of the crossing into Egypt – but that is not a part of the negotiations with
Israel.)

IF THERE had been direct negotiations, this would have been comparatively easy. But with so many mediators vying with each other, it’s difficult.

Last Wednesday, Haaretz disclosed an amazing piece of news: the Israeli Foreign Ministry – yes, the fief of Avigdor Lieberman! – proposes turning the problem over to the United Nations. Let them propose the conditions for the cease fire.

The UN? The institution almost universally despised in Israel? Well, as the Yiddish saying goes, “when God wills, even a broomstick can shoot.”

Assuming that a ceasefire is achieved (and not just a short humanitarian one, that no side intends to keep), what then?

Will serious peace negotiations become possible? Will Abbas join as the representative of all Palestinians, including Hamas? Will this war be the last one, or remain just another episode in an endless chain of wars?

I HAVE a crazy fantasy.
Peace will come and filmmakers will produce movies about this war, too.

One scene: Israeli soldiers discover a tunnel and enter it in order to clear it of enemies. At the same time, Hamas fighters enter the tunnel at the other end, on their way to attack a kibbutz.

The fighters meet in the middle, beneath the fence. They see each other in the dim light. And then, instead of shooting, they shake hands.
A mad idea? Indeed. Sorry.
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Seing two wars is twice more difficult, but it is fundamental!

You should watch the Gatekeepers as well, the second link has the whole film and subtitles

cosmos-documentaries.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/the-gatekeepers-documentary-film-online.html

For uri, in many languages( arabic, hebrew, french, english, russian etc)
http://www.gush-shalom.org

Sent from my iPhone

Years ago I left my country to study and sea the world. Somehow, I ended up  arriving in NY days before 911.

Maybe it was then that I started to care so much about the middle east. First because of the absurd that was happening in the US. Later because my path would lead me to meet people from these areas.

Years ago I started to read about the Question of Palestine. Then eventually I was there. Breaking all the prejudices I had learned through my path. Some of you here in this list remember when I was in front of the separation wall between Palestine and Israel. How much I cried that day, not fully understanding because by then I had friends in both sides of the wall that in any other world could have been friends.

Here in Brazil my own family gets startled by the fact that I care so much about a place that is so far away. They do not understand I was treated like I was home everywhere there. They took care of me. In both sides, they really took care of me.

I was there when both Vittorio Arrigoni and Juliano Mer were killed.  And I am so thankful to so many people in both sides of the wall that  I decided to write this simple message. It is not because of the profound pain I feel…. The human pain for humanity, it is because of the sadness, the loss of hope, and because I read today what Sayed Kashua had written for the Guardian.

I had read soo much of what he has written through these years. Which is always painful and sarcastic. I had seen a whole documentary  about his life. A Palestinian writer that wrote in Hebrew. But today, I write because his voice went to the depth of my soul.  Sayed Kashua who had already spoken of always being scared was now leaving Israel.

Together with Sayed, I also heard the voices of many Israelis who were not the most left wing people also planning to go away.  I heard the voice of one of the people I most trust in this world feeling tired, scared, disappointed and somehow hopeless.  But who, am I? to say anything? So I will copy and paste… the voice, of the Palestinian who writes in Hebrew… this time, in English. His words say more than mine..

•  Sunday 20 July 2014

Sayed Kashua: why I have to leave Israel

The Arab-Israeli author moved to Jerusalem as a child and has devoted his life to telling Israelis the Palestinian story. But last week he decided to emigrate with his family to the US

Sayed Kashua in Jerusalem. ‘I wanted to tell the Israelis a story, the Palestinian story. Surely when they read it they will understand.’

Quite soon I am going away from here. In a few days we’ll be leaving Jerusalem, leaving the country. Yesterday we bought little suitcases for the kids. No need to take a lot of clothes, we’ll leave our winter clothes; in any event they won’t be warm enough given the cold of southern Illinois, USA. We’ll just need a few things until we get settled. Perhaps the kids should take some books, two or three in Arabic, and another few in Hebrew, so they don’t forget the languages. But I’m already not sure what I want my kids to remember of this place, so beloved and so cursed.

The original plan was to leave in a month for a year’s sabbatical. But last week I understood that I can’t stay here any longer, and I asked the travel agent to get us out of here as fast as possible, “and please make them one-way tickets”. In a few days we’ll land in Chicago, and I don’t even know where we’ll be for the first month, but we’ll figure it out.

I have three children, a daughter who is already 14 years old, and two sons, aged nine and three. We live in West Jerusalem. We are the only Arab family living in our neighbourhood, to which we moved six years ago. “You can choose two toys,” we said this week in Hebrew to our little boy who stood in his room gazing at boxes of his toys, and he started to cry despite our promises that we will buy him anything he wants when we get there.

I also have to decide what to take. I can choose only two books, I said to myself standing in front of shelves of books in my study. Other than a book of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and another story collection by Jubran Khalil, all of my books are in Hebrew. Since the age of 14 I have barely read a book in Arabic.

When I was 14 I saw a library for the first time. Twenty-five years ago my maths teacher in the village of Tira, where I was born, came to my parents’ home and told them that next year the Jews would be opening a school for gifted students in Jerusalem. He said to my father that he thought I should apply. “It will be better for him there,” I remember the teacher telling my parents. I got in, and when I was the age of my daughter I left my home to go to a Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem. It was so difficult, almost cruel. I cried when my father hugged me and left me at the entrance of the grand new school, nothing like I had ever seen in Tira.

I once wrote that the first week in Jerusalem was the hardest week of my life. I was different, other; my clothes were different, as was my language. All of the classes were in Hebrew – science, bible, literature. I sat there not understanding one word. When I tried to speak everyone would laugh at me. I so much wanted to run back home, to my family, to the village and friends, to the Arabic language. I cried on the phone to my father that he should come and get me, and he said that only the beginnings are hard, that in a few months I would speak Hebrew better than they do.

I remember the first week, our literature teacher asked us to read The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger. It was the first novel I ever read. It took me several weeks to read it, and when I finished I understood two things that changed my life. The first was that I could read a book in Hebrew, and the second was the deep understanding that I loved books.

Very quickly my Hebrew became nearly perfect. The boarding school library only had books in Hebrew, so I began to read Israeli authors. I read Agnon, Meir Shalev, Amos Oz and I started to read about Zionism, about Judaism and the building of the homeland.

During these years I also began to understand my own story, and without planning to do so I began to write about Arabs who live in an Israeli boarding school, in the western city, in a Jewish country. I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother. To write how my grandfather was killed in the battle over Tira in 1948, how my grandmother lost all of our land, how she raised my father while she supported them as a fruit picker paid by the Jews.

I wanted to tell, in Hebrew, about my father who sat in jail for long years, with no trial, for his political ideas. I wanted to tell the Israelis a story, the Palestinian story. Surely when they read it they will understand, when they read it they will change, all I have to do is write and the Occupation will end. I just have to be a good writer and I will free my people from the ghettos they live in, tell good stories in Hebrew and I will be safe, another book, another movie, another newspaper column and another script for television and my children will have a better future. Thanks to my stories one day we will turn into equal citizens, almost like the Jews.

Twenty-five years of writing in Hebrew, and nothing has changed. Twenty-five years clutching at the hope, believing it is not possible that people can be so blind. Twenty-five years during which I had few reasons to be optimistic but continued to believe that one day this place in which both Jews and Arabs live together would be the one story where the story of the other is not denied. That one day the Israelis would stop denying the Nakba, the Occupation, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. That one day the Palestinians would be willing to forgive and together we would build a place that was worth living in.

Twenty-five years that I am writing and knowing bitter criticism from both sides, but last week I gave up. Last week something inside of me broke. When Jewish youth parade through the city shouting “Death to the Arabs,” and attack Arabs only because they are Arabs, I understood that I had lost my little war.

I listened to the politicians and the media and I know that they are differentiating between blood and blood, between peoples. Those who have become the powers that be say expressly what most Israelis think, “We are a better people than the Arabs.” On panels that I participated in, it was said that Jews are a superior people, more entitled to life. I despair to know that an absolute majority in the country does not recognise the rights of an Arab to live.

After my last columns some readers beseeched that I be exiled to Gaza, threatened to break my legs, to kidnap my children. I live in Jerusalem, and I have some wonderful Jewish neighbours, and friends, but I still cannot take my children to day camps or to parks with their Jewish friends. My daughter protested furiously and said no one would know she is an Arab because of her perfect Hebrew but I would not listen. She shut herself in her room and wept.

Now I am standing in front of my bookshelves, Salinger in hand, the one I read 14 years ago. I don’t want to take any books, I decided, I have to concentrate on my new language. I know how hard it is, almost impossible, but I must find another language to write in, my children will have to find another language to live in.

“Don’t come in,” my daughter shouted angrily when I knocked on her door. I went in anyway. I sat down next to her on the bed and despite her back turned to me I knew she was listening. You hear, I said, before I repeated to her exactly the same sentence my father said to me 25 years ago. “Remember, whatever you do in life, for them you will always, but always, be an Arab. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” my daughter said, hugging me tightly. “Dad, I knew that a long time ago.”

“Quite soon we’ll be leaving here,” as I messed up her hair, just as she hates. “Meanwhile, read this,” I said and gave her The Catcher in the Rye.

Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian writer whose novels have been translated into 15 languages. The film Dancing Arabs, based on his first novel, opened the 2014 Jerusalem international film festival. His most recent novel, Exposure, was published by Chatto & Windus. Translated by Deborah Harris

Article in the Guardian here:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/sayed-kashua-why-i-have-to-leave-israel?CMP=fb_gu

I was not going to write anymore about the world cup, but since so many people have written me to ask what I think about what happened, and I actually have explained to some here it goes.

I think it was a mystery that Brazil could go as far as it did. Short of mind-boggling. No, not them loosing, but them reaching as far as they did with a team that was not very strong. Even more amazing was to see the population go from apathy to total fury because of the 7-1 yesterday in the game between Germany and Brazil.

Seriously, how could anyone actually  have expected that Brazil would beat Germany?When most of their team play together in Bayern München and have so much experience playing together.  Germany has been a great team for such a long time now.

Today Argentina will play Holland.  And many Brazilians are supporting Argentina. Intriguing isn’t it?  Some rationalise it, that they want the  cup to remain in this continent. Other’s like me really admire Messi. Could Argentina win in one player only? Who knows? Holland should definitely be taken seriously, yet, to be quite honest they have played so violently so many times.. that it is hard to invoke the admiration to the old dutch team in our memories.

The reason I write today about this, is because, in fact I was quite appalled by the reaction Brazilians (who first did not want Brazil to win) had. Flags were burned, bussed were burned, foreigners were harmed. And that is definitely shameful.

I remembered Darcy Ribeiro, the anthropologist and writer who ran away from hospital to write the book called “O Povo Brazileiro” ( the Brazilian people). There he argues that Brazilians were not Africans, nor Indigenous, nor Europeans. He claims that because of the mix ( true love and rape etc) these mixed children were rejected by all. They were Brazilian. I would add that it goes way further than this beginning of interaction. Brazilians learned to accept all that came in their path.

Till very recently our main Cathedral in Sāo Paulo held Jewish, Christian and Islamic events when Mosques and Synagogues did not exist here. Everything else was integrated…. from Asia to middle eastern cultures. Everything was incorporated, in a symbolic system that in Brazil antagonism did not really matter. That is not the same to say that in Brazil there is no violence, no inequality. It is to say that they received Jews and Nazis, Japanese and Chinese, Sirian and Lebanese. And that they have learned to incorporate their beliefs with indigenous and Africans.

That is why, it was so embarrassing to hear people were attacking property and people for something that till a couple weeks ago they did not want.

But today, when the day had risen I went to the buss station to exchange my tickets since I have a cold and as I entered the bus station, after having read so much crap in the internet I saw hundreds of Argentinians in Sao Paulo singing. It was actually quite beautiful. It was even more beautiful to see that Brazilians filmed it. Watched it and did not start a fight. It was the same in the tube, and even close to my house. There were dozens of Argentinians singing.

It made me happy.  At least the usual respect for the outside remained here, even when their arch-rival was singing in our lands.

Who knows… maybe Messi can win alone 🙂 And if they don’t, a game between a non motivated Brazilian team and Argentina should definitely  text how strong is “o povo Brasileiro”.

PS: After the game: I supported Argentina the whole time! And Messi did not win alone. Mascherano was amazing! In fact both teams played really well.  But Romeno is way better keeper than the Dutch guy.  I am happy they won. I am happy that all their joy I had seen yesterday all over Sao Paulo had result. How could one not admire those who came in every single way here,  knowing their economy is collapsed to support their team. It was really beautiful!  Congratulations!