In a parallel line she walked along Ben Gurion Avenue (it was called Carmel St before the Nakba of Palestinians and the establishment of the state of Israel) and in parallel she thought about her duties: her grandmother is in the hospital and she should visit her. And in parallel society she lived, when she heard the Hebrew language spoken around her and realized that other Jewish Israeli people live here and her Palestinian society is fragmented. The heated discussion up in Masada St, where all the hipster intellectuals gathered for a glass of beer and an attempt to make sense of it all, wouldn’t even make up for the contradictions that she just witnessed in her short stroll from the lower Hadar to Abbas st down to Carmel St. The discussion took place in Elika, a local bar that she frequents very often, and this time they talked about the upcoming elections in Israel.
To vote or not to vote. This is the question.
The Arabic political parties are a farce, my friend Odna thinks, and they are a joke only used as a fig leaf for a fascist apartheid regime that claims to be democratic. I could see her veins dilating in her neck as she spoke out of spite: “what have they done for us? they have no ideology, no vision and nothing! they’re doing this only for the money” I get her, but still how can we keep living in this place if we were not to vote? I have to vote because this is our only chance of reaching a reconciliation and of improving the life conditions of our reality. I mean sure, boycott but then what? you cannot negate something without providing an alternative and also we all know that it’s best to change the system through the system not to build a parallel, paralyzed one next to it? But then as I walked down Shalom St and descended the stairs to Hertzilya St, I thought of real national time and space. I once wrote a paper about how colonization disrupts real national time (in Bakhtin words) and how such disruption impedes national as well as personal, existential development. And this could not be more true. Here I am walking down Haifa streets, a city I have lived in for three years, and I am going to a job interview that I don’t like but I need the money, and I have to visit my grandmother who is in the hospital, where my aunts and uncles will be, who will probably criticize my new lip piercing, and then my dad would tell me to take it off and then he will ask me about the work I’m doing, and then I would pretend everything is okay because I don’t want him to realize i have nihilistic, depressed tendencies. So it’s all a chaos, as you can see. Earlier, before we talked about elections, I had beer with a real friend of mine, though he is old (60 years old) but we came to develop a strong friendship that has helped me along these years. And talking with him made me realize that I don’t have an ultimate absolute in this life, and I lack the national historical time to belong to my community in this reality so I can make it better. Especially after I lived abroad last summer. Especially after I worked relentlessly with social campaigns against racism and other projects in my community, in which I felt totally helpless. As if I’m sifting water, as the saying goes. So this shortness of the horizon, this lack of a vision that this place is actually mine and I have authority and power to shape it, to knead it and to attempt to improve it. And now the last straw to grasp to hope is fading: Palestinians in Israel want to boycott the upcoming elections. I just don’t get it.
So here I am walking down Carmel st, from the top holy Bahaai gardens all the way to Aroma cafe so I can have a job interview that I don’t like so I can survive and pay for the beer that I will drink in the upcoming month when I meet friends to talk about elections and boycott and the beer should be good and the company should be better and I will soon enough forget that Carmel St has turned to Ben Gurion St and that not far away from Elika bar a war is taking place.
AICHA BINT YUSIF 