Fringes is delighted to publish an article by our good friend Daniel Ming, who studied abroad in Ramallah in the Palestinian Territories during his junior year of college. Dan maintained a blog throughout the experience and has continued to post since he returned. We highly recommend you go check out his blog here, and we are extremely grateful that he has given us permission to share this piece with our readers. More of his work will appear in our upcoming print edition of Fringes!
The tranquil Kibbutz, in context.
by Daniel Ming
originally posted October 7, 2008, at http://danielming.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/the-tranquil-kibbutz-in-context/
During my recent weeklong vacation, I spent a night visiting family friends in the Negev desert between the Israeli city of Beersheva and the border of the Gaza Strip. For the past three decades, they have lived in Kibbutz Urim, a socialist cooperative founded in the early 40’s by Bulgarian immigrants. A radical departure from the hustle and bustle of Ramallah, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (where I have spent most of my time so far), the Kibbutz seemed to be an oasis of tranquility amidst all of the tensions, both commercial and political, of Israeli and Palestinian city life.
After returning to Ramallah, pulling out a map and realizing where I actually was, things seem a little different.
Less than a few hours away, residents of the Israeli town of Sderot have lived with the trauma of repeated rocket attacks over the past eight years. Although the accuracy and relative death toll caused by these weapons can be disputed, I cannot even begin to imagine the psychological damage that having thousands of rockets constantly falling on a city would have on its inhabitants.
Less than 20 kilometers away from the Kibbutz, over a million Palestinians in Gaza continue to live under economic siege in a man-made humanitarian crisis, described by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire as comparable to “a ghetto, a huge prison, with Israel holding the keys to all the doors.” Another peace activist, Israeli professor Jeff Halper, described the situation to Amnesty International as “an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity.”
It’s haunting to think that so close to this peaceful Kibbutz there exists so much suffering, both physical and emotional. The only time that I was able to collect any tangible evidence that these places were actually real was at night on the bus, when the city lights made discernible unknown villages, towns and walls in the distance. They looked quiet to me – although at night in the desert, everything seems to have an illusion of calm.
