When the judge is
your enemy, you have
nothing to lose
Michael Elcock
Bad words
Michael Elcock
Orwell was a master at outing euphemism in language, as Rose Galt suggests (19 October). In ‘1984’, the Ministry of Truth was the outfit that indulged vigorously in what we now call ‘spin’ – how to make us believe a piece of information means something completely different to what we think it means.
Orwell’s Ministry of Peace was involved with the conduct of war, as she says; much like the Ministry of Defence. The main task of the Ministry of Plenty was to ration food and other essential supplies. The Ministry of Love was involved with brutal police work and surveillance.
But when I first migrated to Canada the thing that shocked me most was the graphic vocabulary of swearing. The language of the workplace was much more imaginative and expressive than the simple, straightforward four-letter word world of Edinburgh or South Queensferry. At first I was appalled at the viscerally descriptive language I encountered when I went to work in a pulp mill. It was brutally direct, and brilliantly imaginative, but I could never bring myself to use it.
Years later when I wrote about those days in a non-fiction book I found that I still couldn’t bring myself to spell out those swear words, and resorted instead to a series of letters and stars.
Gradually though – as with most swearing – Canada’s uniquely base workplace linguistics acquired a casual aspect. You simply got used to them, and that tended to halt any analysis of their meaning. Now, most of the words that I encountered then seem to have gone out of fashion in much the same way that people here no longer pour tomato juice into their lager. Or maybe they just disappeared because I no longer work in the mill, or in the woods, or digging ditches.
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Photograph by
Islay McLeod
When the judge is
your enemy, you have
nothing to lose
Makluba: Part 3
Joanne McNally
Two associations accompanied me throughout the trip: taghreed (voice of birds) and rashshaash (machine guns). Palestine has the voice of birds which still sing – that’s to say express themselves – in spite of their captivity. When she does not sing, you still feel that she wants to and that she will, and that she is waiting for her moment to sing at full throttle like the blackbird at dawn.
Israel has machine guns visibly on display at all times – whether in the central bus station in Jerusalem, on buses, on settler’s backs or at all the countless checkpoints (mashoom). And the atmosphere which accompanies them is such that you know they may be used at any moment (and indeed have been).
At the bleak and desolate Erez crossing, as I sat and waited on a bench near the security guard’s bullet-proof office with a Palestinian family, an Israeli soldier in a tower some 50 metres away held a machine-gun ready to fire and pointed it directly at us the whole time in an act of intimidation. Yet, we were obviously no threat: we were chatting and sharing fruit and just waiting until we had permission to cross. And the firing of guns the other side of the crossing did not escape us, nor the fact that two civilians had been killed in Gaza two days before.
We were not deterred. Indeed, many Palestinians spend whole days at the crossing. And the crossing itself (which is punctuated by many more security checks once past the initial barrier) is designed as a cattle-walk – a caged path stretching for about 1km into bombed and forbidden landscape. Once through to the other side, a recent (German-funded) sewage treatment centre in honour of Tony Blair greets you by the road, and immediately opposite, you cannot help noticing the shelled residential buildings still bearing the scars of the recent war on Gaza.
On my return through the Erez Crossing and after enduring even more vigorous security checks (including a full Star Trek-like body scan), I joined a group of Palestinians waiting patiently under a bit of shade until they could obtain permission to cross. One Palestinian had even come prepared with a shi-shi pipe which he fetched from his car and offered to others who were waiting. The joke was shared – the Palestinians still tried to retain their sense of humour in spite of it all.
Not all Israelis are active oppressors or complicit bystanders to injustices and atrocities. Some brave individuals and groups have been and are speaking out and demonstrating alongside Palestinians.
Mahmoud Darwish’s philosophical and poetical work about being under siege in Beirut ‘In Memory of Forgetfulness’ (Beirut, August 1982) also accompanied me throughout this trip. His passage about ‘water’ is particularly poignant when you travel in this part of the world and witness the ways in which the Palestinians are deprived of this essential resource whilst under siege or under occupation:
What is water? Who says it has no color, flavor, or odour? What is water? Chemically, it’s H2O. But is it only that? What, then, is the fragrance that opens out the skin, to bring us to a feast there, in the vastness of the body and its quarters, until we almost take on the nature of butterflies? Water is the joy of the senses and the air that surrounds them. Water is that very air, distilled, tangible, perceptible, saturated with light. For this reason prophets have urged their people to love water: ‘we made from water every living thing’…Our water has been cut by those acting on behalf of leftover Crusaders, yet Saladin used to send ice and fruits to the enemy in the hope that ‘their hearts would melt’, as he used to say.
And although Mahmoud Darwish’s works are often punctuated with death and a sense of loss, life and hope still radiate very strongly. He epitomises more than anyone else the Palestinian soul which is why he is so universally loved. In one of his later poems, ‘Counterpoint’ (for Edward Said), he recalls his first encounter with Said 30 years earlier:
The time was less willful than now.
We both said: if your past is experience,
make tomorrow into meaning and vision!
Let us go, let us go to our tomorrow confidently,
with the truth of imagination and the miracle of grass
Not all Israelis are active oppressors or complicit bystanders to injustices and atrocities. Some brave individuals and groups have been and are speaking out and demonstrating alongside Palestinians, for instance, in Arab areas which are being taken over by settlers. One such area is in Wadi Joz in east Jerusalem which is the site of regular Friday demonstrations. Another is the village of Yanoun near Nablus. Villagers of Yanoun have been subjected to threats and harassment by settlers from the illegal settlement of Itamar for over 15 years. They have been violently beaten; their animals and livestock mutilated and their land seized. And yet not one Yanouni villager has hurt a settler. Nevertheless, their complaints have been ignored by those legally charged with protecting them – the Israeli army and border police.
Adult settlers kept coming to the edge of the village and throwing rocks at the villagers. They were not stopped, even when they beat up fathers in front of their children. Yet, Palestinian children are shot at, maimed and even killed if they are seen throwing stones. This is makluba.
Rights organisations, such as Yesh Din, have complained for decades that there is a clear systematic lack of law enforcement against settlers. When a settler who had persistently attacked villagers from Yanoun from outposts near Itamar was finally brought before a court, the trial was seen as a farce as the judge, according to David Nir, was deeply biased against both the Palestinians and the Israeli peace activists: ‘it was a comedy, not a trial. The judge’s hatred of Arabs, and Palestinians in particular, was quite obvious’. And when the judge is your enemy you have nothing to lose.
Tell it as it is, so the Tracy Chapman song goes. Why have the
mainstream media not been giving us the true facts on the ground – on
the Palestinian ground?
Special thanks to Khadijeh Habashneh for assisting with initial introductions in Jordan and Ramallah, and to Dr Nazmi Al-Ju’beh who first introduced me to the word ‘makluba’ on 22 June 2011
Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 2
Joanne McNally is a writer, poet, and independent scholar
