Hell is empty and all the devils are here

Until now, I have written about my Israeli heritage precisely three times in my life. For atrocity-based reasons, I am going there again. 

Things I am trying to avoid:

• Understandable yet simplistic hot takes on an objectively fucking terrible situation
• Predictable "on reflection" lukewarm takes on the same

If you feel I am veering in either of those directions please accept my apologies and step away. What I'm aiming for is to communicate my specific perspective on what is happening in Israel / Palestine at the moment. If you don't know me, this is probably not for you. If you feel this might upset you, likewise. I don't really know whether I have anything differentiating to say, anything that adds any value, but many people have expressed an interest in understanding the situation better, and god knows there are some bad faith takes out there. So here's what I have. 

My facts

I have a lot of family in Israel, and I have been there four times. My paternal grandmother arrived in Palestine as the youngest child of a family fleeing Nazi Germany. She met a British soldier stationed there during WW2 as part of the Palestine Mandate, they married, and my dad was their first child. He was born there *during the war*. The Holocaust was *still happening*. I find it astonishing that people got on and made babies in those circumstances, but I find it astonishing that people get on and make babies in pretty much any circumstance, so we'll leave that one there. So he's Jewish, and born in a Palestinian city which became part of Israel when it came into being in 1948. My grandmother left Israel when her husband was stationed elsewhere but returned after he died in the 1970s; her siblings and most of their families did not leave, and are fully Israeli. Her father's whole extended family was murdered in the Lodz ghetto. Maybe I actually *can* see why they got on and made babies.  

I went to Israel twice as a child, and twice as a young adult (at 18 and 22). The childhood visits were magical -- I have strong memories of experiences that reached all of my senses. Everything was so different and yet this was part of my family, they just lived in a hot place with lizards and orange trees and open top jeeps, and they spoke a different language and ate different food and laughed at different things. There were some edgy moments -- we wanted to go to Bethlehem (this might have been my request, I had a list of must-see places from an early age) and the relative who accompanied us brought along a handgun, saying okay, let's go, ABC (Another Bloody Church). That journey would be fully impossible now, and it looks a whole lot different with ye olde hindsight. At 10, I didn't even understand why custody of the putative birthplace of the little baby Jesus was fought over by three different branches of Christianity, let alone why a Jew might feel unsafe bringing us to an Arab town. Why doesn't everyone just share the church? I said. Mwahaha. I was a serious kid, but I did not grow up in a conflict zone, and for this I will always be grateful. 

The first time I went to Israel by myself was to do the kibbutz thing on my year off. I'm going to say that my political acuity was sharper by then, and I had read more history, but I did still have a fairly romantic view of the kibbutz movement and Israel in general. And the kibbutz had a lot going for it -- there was a huge swimming pool, elder care and child care both seemed to be excellent, there was a giant party in the bomb shelter every Friday night, fantastic breakfast and dinner was available every day for everyone, sparkling water came out of a tap in the wall, and there was a sense of collective community endeavour that I had never experienced. 

The kibbutz I was allocated to was Yagur - one of the largest and oldest, and an important centre for the Haganah during the Palestine Mandate era. I didn't know this at the time, but I did know that it had a sense of itself that I didn't understand. And I knew that its residents, unlike the random (ish, we were vetted, but we were from many countries and not all Jewish) volunteers, hated the "Arab village" with a similar name that was a mile or two away. The Arab village was where we volunteers got our hard liquor, and also where the kibbutz sourced a chunk of the labour for its factories. I worked in one of those factories, which moulded plastic tubes, filled them with toiletries from vast vats. then sealed and packed them. The work was mind-numbing. Bearable for a month or so if you found ways to keep your mind occupied (they did let us listen to music under our ear defenders and if you've ever wondered why I love Between The Wars so much, well it was night shifts in the plastic tube factory). They didn't like us, the kibbutznik managers, but they didn't treat us badly. We were an interchangeable necessary evil, and some of us were girls. The Arab workers, they did treat badly. Maybe not at an Amazon warehouse level, but so that you really fucking noticed. And even then, I thought, I'm here for a few months. It's not going to help this woman I'm sitting next to if I get up in the face of the foreman for treating her like shit. I don't know if she'd even thank me. 

The kibbutzniks my age were mostly in the army: there were soldiers, and checkpoints, and guns everywhere. Several of the older ones were very kind to us, and generous with their stories: one of them would have people round for beers on a Friday night after the shabbat meal and before the bomb shelter party. He had a concentration camp tattoo on his forearm, the first one I ever saw in real life. He didn't talk about that, but he talked about how the kibbutz had changed over the years. I was at Yagur for the celebration of 40 years since the founding of the state of Israel, and also Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, which no one told us about (maybe presuming that we knew) and I lost my shit when the air raid sirens went off. There was so much to absorb. It was also the place I took my first pregnancy test, which in 1988 was *not* as simple as peeing on a stick, got my first (and last) all over tan, and generally had some wild times. 

I also spent time with my family while I was there, including my grandmother. There was one hot afternoon when we were resting at her brother's house and she told me how she arrived in Palestine. It is a great regret of mine that I never wrote that story down, or recorded her talking, her English was fluent but heavily accented, and she had a very Yiddish turn of phrase. The cousins my own age were full Sabras -- they were friendly and welcoming, but there was a huge cultural gap that hadn't been there ten years earlier. The boys drove like absolute maniacs. One of the girls asked me when I was going to move to Israel. I said that I didn't plan to, and she asked me "why not? Israel is the only real country".

So I experienced a few things on that trip that moved some of my assumptions around, but I *was* only 18. It was my last visit that, to use a technical term, did my head in. 

I was a whole four years older for that, but in between I got a degree in social and political science. I learnt that a lot of people were pretty ill-informed about the whole Holocaust business -- even some SPS students (one of whom asked, casually, in her first term "was Hitler the first world war or the second world war?" Guys, this was Cambridge!), but I also learnt about my own ignorance. 

My understanding of the Israeli occupation first came into my world via feminism. As part of the Women's Executive Committee, I was *thoroughly* schooled by a Palestinian woman while we were preparing positions for NUS conference. If that sentence makes no sense, you did not do student politics. Which may be all to the good, it's kinda batshit, but it also helps you sharpen your thinking the fuck up. 

By the time I left, I knew about the Nakba, the First Intifada was underway, and we'd also been through the first Gulf War. My grandmother was still alive at the time, and it became very apparent why there were bomb shelters everywhere. One of my friends was experiencing equally high anxiety but from the other side of the war: he was Arab Muslim and his parents were in Kuwait. We were safe in our centuries old courtyards, but it all felt very close. 

My final (well, most recent) visit was in 1992, as part of a year's backpacking with my Significant Ex. We sandwiched about a month there in between two stints in Egypt -- one of the few countries in the region at the time that would accept people with Israeli stamps in their passports. We entered overland, on a bus from Cairo to Tel Aviv that was full of budget travellers like us. Only I nearly didn't make it across the border. The immigration form asked why we were visiting Israel and I said, truthfully, that I was visiting my family. The border guard started speaking to me in Hebrew. I don't speak Hebrew, I said. But you're Israeli! he said. I'm not though, I said, I'm British. 

They thought otherwise, or at least their computer records did. They told me I had an Israeli grandfather called Ze'ev, when I actually had a Lancastrian grandfather (long deceased) called Ben. It was all pretty stressful. They took my passport away for about an hour, and when they returned it, they had *written inside it*. In Hebrew. Which I couldn't read. What am I supposed to do with this? I asked. They told me to report to the Ministry of the Interior. 

I can't remember all the details, but basically their records had me as an Israeli citizen, and therefore eligible for military service. I had to visit government offices in two cities before I could get paperwork to leave the country (the opposite of the kind of paperwork most people are hoping for, amirite) -- and that took another several nail-biting hours on another land border, as lots of men with guns examined my letter and barked questions at me. So you know, we had a good time, the family were as hospitable as ever, we climbed Masada, we visited Jerusalem, we swam in the Sea of Galilee, we ate the best falafel in the world (Haifa bus station, may it never change). And I did get to leave, but I was pretty shaken with my encounter with the apparatus of state, as inconsequential as it was in the *waves arms in despair* scheme of things. 

I was so shaken that I've never been back, which meant I never saw my grandmother again before she died, but these things stay with you. 

My feelings

The staying with you, I would argue, is a large part of how the world got into this mess. I suppressed a lot of my feelings about all of this for a long time, because, frankly, I could. But the first time I "went there", I wrote something in the early 2000s for an internal newsletter at NGO X after I met a Palestinian colleague who was running a programme in the occupied West Bank. We got drunk together and danced to I Will Survive. He was amazing, and his partying had an edge that I really identified with. 

I don't have a copy of the thing I wrote, but I remember how hard it was to find words that worked, the ones I could find didn't seem to do the job. I know what I was trying to say, which was that the people who are attached to but not embedded in a situation, who have a stake in the game but not one their life depends on, and who can see the parallels and the equivalence while acknowledging the pain and the injustice, they are maybe the best placed to be the peacemakers. And blessed are the peacemakers, I was taught by the nuns who failed to make me into a good Catholic girl, for they shall be called the children of God. 

I am not sure that's enough of an incentive, frankly. Doesn't seem to be working, at any rate. 

The second time was on this here blog, back in 2008. I was very hedgy, but even so I was hesitant. And the third time was something I wrote at the request of one of my neighbours to celebrate the Jewish culture and heritage of the city that I live in. I did it, but I felt a bit weird about it, because I don't really feel Jewish. I was raised Catholic, my dad is a full strength atheist (as, these days, am I), and outside Israel I've never been part of any Jewish cultural stuff even. I've never been to a synagogue service. I've never even been to a bar/bat mitzvah. I like matzos, lox and bagels, chicken soup and dill pickles, but aside from that and a few Yiddish phrases and a house that has a (decorative) menorah and shofar, I'm not on the team. 

Israeli though, I do feel a bit Israeli. Which is why I'm here doing this. A bunch of other people are doing it too, many of them better than me (this is excellent, if you're done with the personal stories), but a lot of them without any of the perspective that skin in the game can bring. 

My thoughts

Okay, so if you're still with me, here are five things I believe.

1. The arc of the moral universe is long, but (with apologies to MLK) I don't think it does always bend towards justice. I think we say that to make ourselves feel better.
2. I don't think you can judge anyone by the behaviour of the government of the country they live in, even if they voted for one of the parties of government. We all know electoral systems are flawed. Some places don't even have them. 
3. We are all, overwhelmingly, a product of our environment, including to the extent we learn critical thinking. 
4. We're only just beginning to understand epigenetic trauma.
5. The vast majority of violence, including by and against civilians, is perpetrated by men. 

Taking them from the top. 

1. A lot, a LOT, of hot air is spouted about Jewish people vs the state of Israel, including by Jewish people. You can be anti-Zionist and Jewish, people say. You can be anti-Zionist and not anti-semitic. They're not the same! And it's true. They're not the same. But while Jews and Israel are conceptually and philosophically distinguishable *they are not separable*. Not since Israel has existed. 

Antisemitism is a real fucking thing. It manifests differently to other forms of racism, but that doesn't make it less real or less dangerous. It's been around forever, it has never gone away, and I don't think it ever will. I have never wanted to be defined by my Jewishness any more than I have wanted to be defined by my gender -- not because I want to disown them, but because they're just not that important to me. But tough shit, or, as my dad says, toughski shitski. The world will do that for you. 

European history is littered with pogroms. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, over hundreds of years, were massacred simply for being identifiably Jewish people living Jewish lives. This was pre the full-on genocide, and pogroms are not exclusively a Jewish experience (ask the gypsies, for example), but it was a form of structural -- at very least cultural -- oppression. And, like lynching in Jim Crow-era America, the people who were murdered did not have support, or access to justice, from any of the branches of government. They weren't valued enough to protect, or avenge.

This all sounds pompous as hell, but bear with me. Because after some centuries of collective absorption of this, maybe with what I would consider to be an over-investment in Talmudic teachings about non-violence, there was the Holocaust. 

I'd like to think that I don't have to describe the Holocaust to anyone reading this. But if you're not sure you know what happened, take yourself to the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I've been to the first and the third of these, as well as other atrocity-based museums. It's not a competition and I try hard not to be obsessed with the worst of humanity. But if you can't a) unconditionally accept that this was one of the worst genocidal acts in human history and b) there are consequences to that, you're reading the wrong blog post. 

And essentially, my view is Holocaust = Israel. If the world didn't want Israel, it should have prevented, or at best stopped the Holocaust. WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN? Israel's establishment in 1948 and a lot of what's happened since has been fuelled by European guilt, backed by American dollars and delivered by Never Again fully existential Jewish fury. 

I'm not trying to excuse the Nakba. I never have. And I don't want to live in Israel -- hell, I have the paperwork to prove it. But I support its right to exist, and I can see a future where I might be grateful for it. For now, whatever it does, Israel (in some form) is going nowhere. It didn't have to happen, but it did, and that's not just on the Jews. I voted for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour, but I can see why a lot of Jewish people couldn't -- my learning from those years is that anti-semitism lurks. It was suppressed rather than excised, or even neutralised. Give it an inch, and it'll take a mile. Black Americans know this about racism. Women know this about misogyny. I don't want it to be the case but yeesh. 

2. Populations are not their governments. In this country, if they were, the Iraq War wouldn't have happened (flipside, we might have brought back hanging, but give Braverman time). You've only to read, or ideally listen to, because he reads it very engagingly, Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge to get a sense of how hard it is to influence policy or effect meaningful change even if you are a minister in the government of the day. Most MPs in the party in power are not ministers, most MPs (usually) do not belong to the party in power, most MPs were not elected by a majority of their electorate, or even the majority of the people who voted. And we count as a functioning parliamentary democracy. 

Israel is also a functioning parliamentary democracy, though it is on its thirty-seventh government in 75 years, as a result of there never having been a majority or even a stable minority government. This is down to the plethora and diversity of its political parties, and a very pure form of proportional representation. Coalition governments can have their strengths, but can also mean striking some pretty unsavoury deals (in this case, with right wing extremists) in order to function at all. And the people of Gaza have not had an election since 2006, which is when Hamas came to power. No one under 35 has ever had the chance to vote, and half the population is under 30. 

There are limited other ways to overturn governments that don't want to go, and pretty much all of them require violence, which is a high-risk choice in a militarised state. Non-violent protest is of course valid, but increasingly restricted and not always safe. So I get the don't mourn, organise message, but sometimes it's a privilege, and honestly, civil disobedience has its limits. Some places, it will get you (or your family) killed, and not everyone is ready to be a martyr. So I have limited time for the "why don't the people of Gaza overthrow Hamas" type arguments. As someone pointed out the other day, hundreds and thousands of demonstrators on the streets of London, Berlin, Washington etc can't even get their governments to get the Israeli government to *pause the bombing to deliver humanitarian aid to civilians*. People do have power, but not much of that kind. 

3. When I was a teenager, I had a Saturday job in a bread shop which briefly also operated a stall in a food market in the next town. It was not a good posting, trade was slow and the other stall holders were not that chatty. But I did once get talking to the guy on the stall next to me, who was probably in his 50s, and he told me that he'd never been further than Preston. Which was about 15 miles away. This blew my mind. I was not well travelled at that point, but I'd been to Spain, Ireland, Austria, Israel and various parts of the UK, and I knew I was only just getting started. 

Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of your language are the limits of your world. I think about that a lot. But the limits of your physical world are just as important. When you meet someone whose life has been steeped in ease and privilege, whose family and surroundings have provided opportunities and removed barriers, you can sometimes meet a person who's full of arrogance and prejudice, who genuinely thinks they are better than other people because they can't see the value of the hand they've been dealt, but you can also sometimes meet a person who has had access to so much love and acceptance that they are wholly generous and altruistic. They can see the best in the world because the world can see the best in them. Most of those people are a bit of both, but I think my weakness for posh men is rooted in the fact that the best of them really aren't misogynist, why on earth would they feel the need to be? And not being misogynist is the fastest way to get with me, so I don't really look much further. 

But when you meet someone whose life has been steeped in oppression, persecution and suffering, there's a different kettle of fish to try and process. I would say they can also be some of the best and the worst of humanity. At worst, in ways I find I can empathise with though not excuse, I can see the desire to annihilate the oppressor. I have had murderous thoughts. I would likely have been recruitable as a terrorist-slash-freedom-fighter, in the right circumstances. If you see no hope in your life, your future, the future of your people or your way of life, what is the best of the limited options available? There might come a point where, as Emilio Zapata said, you feel that it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees. And if you get to that point, why not go out with a bang? 

I stress that I am not justifying any of this. Any of it. 

Because on the other side of that equation are the people who have seen and experienced the unspoken, even the unspeakable, who have, in so many extraordinary, remarkable, humbling ways, held on to their empathy, their sense in a common humanity, or something even deeper. Some of the finest humans I have met in my half century on this earth are those who have been through experiences I can't imagine, who know I have never been subjected to those experiences personally, that I might even have been (or might yet still be) part of the system that perpetrated terror and anguish on their people, their traditions, their family, and can still see *my* humanity. And before they hate me, they look for ways to connect with me, That takes more than balls, that takes faith. Not religious faith, a different kind of faith. But it's the only kind of faith I have. 

Most of the people I have met in my life are at neither of those extremes, of course, but your British people, your Global Northerners even, definitely swing towards privilege, overall. Especially your straight white men. 

My goal, as a young woman, was to be part of the solution. I wanted to fix the world, and (because I was applying logic) I felt that before I could fix it I needed to understand it, so I should see as much of it as possible. And I honestly tried. There are people in my life who've done a much better job of this than I have, intentionally, and I salute them. There are people in my life who've crossed borders to support their families, and there are people in my life who've been flung from pillar to post, from culture to culture, for much darker reasons. I salute them too. But while I recognise that you can never experience someone else's reality, I have learnt so much from some of the places and people I've been privileged enough to visit and meet, whether backpacking or when I was working for NGO X. Young women dying from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, ex-guerilla fighters in Central America, women trying to bring their children up in IDP camps, sex workers in South East Asia, farmers, activists, refugees, survivors of sexual abuse, addicts, orphans, breadwinners, people of deep faith and none. And you know what? Jo Cox was right. We do have far more in common than that which divides us, but not everyone can see that. 

Over the years, I have developed a lasting suspicion that not everyone wants to. Because if you can see the humanity in your enemy, you will start to feel empathy, and once you're feeling empathy, it's a lot harder to shoot them in the head or bomb the fuck out of their hospitals. 

4. Having said that. We're learning that the body keeps the score, and not just from the trauma that is directly perpetrated on us as individuals. We inherit, in ways we don't yet understand, the trauma of our forebears. I don't know much about it myself at all, but I'm reading. Here's an example of how it might be playing out for some Israeli Jews. 

I read something that absolutely chilled me a couple of days ago -- as part of a great Twitter thread (I recommend the whole thing): "...when I think of the children our grandchildren will bring into this world I can't abide the thought that our bloodlust today - our cowardice - will wake them up with nightmares fifty years from now. Their parents have not yet been conceived and we've already scarred them."

Think. On. That. I think she's mainly talking about what their daily realities might be -- endless cyclical conflict for reducing returns on a dying planet -- but babies born to malnourished mothers, to traumatised mothers, to mothers who never felt safe, to mothers who were raped -- those babies don't come out unaffected by that. We hear a lot in safe Western countries (where birth outcomes also skew hard against babies born to disadvantaged mothers) about the importance of a good birth experience -- right now there are women in Gaza having emergency C-sections without anaesthetic, knowing that has been priced in.

What you inherit doesn't excuse what you do, but it can help explain it. There are no level playing fields in this situation.

5. I'm reading thousands of words a day at the moment, seeking to find meaning in horror, to find a place that reflects my grief and rage but in a way that offers hope, even an opportunity to make a difference.

I am not sure that marching will do that for me -- I think branding them as "hate marches" is fucking outrageous, though regretfully not out of character for our Home Secretary -- but it *is* complicated, and slogans do not allow for that. I have been on many marches / demos / sit ins in my life (the last one was protesting the closure of a public library -- if you can't experience places directly you can read their stories) but I can't (yet) do the Free Palestine ones. I did one once, in 2008, because Israel was bombing the fuck out of Gaza -- not anything like in the way it is now, but I was finding it unbearable and I wanted to protest. I joined a group of people in the middle of Oxford -- it wasn't a march as we didn't go anywhere, we moved up and down the same street, holding candles, chanting and waving Palestinian flags. The chant changed to "In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians". And I had to leave. Because I am not Palestinian. If I'm anything in this unholy mess, I'm Israeli. I can't lie by chanting, any more than I can lie any other way. I can't shake shake shake it off. I might hate everything that's happening to the point that I howl at the moon, but I'm not Palestinian.

I feel a bit different about the river to the sea chant -- there's a reading of it that's problematic for me, but many other readings that are fine. My solidarity with the Palestinian people and cause is real, but I can't fit what I want to shout into a tidy chant (I mean, have you *seen* the length of this blog post? And this is the short version). So I don't. But I don't mind if you do, I can see why you do.

We have to acknowledge the complexity. We have to. This didn't start yesterday, and it won't end tomorrow. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and reducing it to a binary is kind of why I never say anything, and why I am anxious even about saying this.

But what I do feel, and I can say, is that this war, this seemingly endless conflict, is overwhelmingly being waged by men. I think the civilian population of Gaza are sacrificial in the game of Hamas, who are on record as wanting to annihilate Israel as a Jewish state, as much as they are sacrificial in the game of Israel, who murder them in their thousands because they're in the way. The Hamas power structure -- and do correct me if I'm wrong -- is entirely male and mostly living in the relative safety of Qatar. Similarly, while Israel has had women leaders and cabinet ministers and is much higher on the gender equality index than any of the countries it is in conflict with, it's run by a macho gerontocracy. It does conscript women (yay equality!) but the soldiers on the front line are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly young. As are (again, unless I've missed something) all of the Hamas operatives.

We know that children don't have a voice in this. Another quote I read this week was from George Bernard Shaw, who, when challenged on his support for the founding of Save The Children in 1919 (specifically their feeding of children from the defeated Austrian Empire), said "I have no enemies under six". But honestly, do you think that the people who birthed those children, who are still birthing children, whose lives are in many ways defined by that, want this conflict to endure? I'm not saying men want to bury their children -- god help me, the photos of dads with their dead kids are the *most* agonising for me, because those dads know that it was other kids' dads that killed their kids. That must be fucking unbearable.

But honestly, while I know women can be dreadful humans, really I do, take all of the men in the world out of the mix for like six months, there'd be a two state solution in draft here. Maybe even a one state solution, which would be more durable, though I reckon that would take more like 18 months. We won't do it, of course, but that's in my global manifesto. Look at a different kind of cost, and a different kind of benefit, can we not? Women's bodies keep the score of actually making new people.

So that's an analysis I'm not hearing much. And the other one is what this shit is doing to the environment. Why am I separating my recycling when whole cities are being pulverised with heavy munitions dropped from fighter jets? Make it make sense. And that's before we get to the deliberate destruction of infrastructure, and I include the deliberate destruction of security in that. People who feel safe can live better lives. More sustainable lives. Lives of justice and regeneration. Survival mode is unsustainable in so many ways.

So where do we go from here? 

It's taken me ages to write this because for several weeks I could barely see the point of getting out of bed, let alone saying anything about why. There are people holding rage and grief everywhere, and if you're one of the ones who doesn't see the complexity you are probably raging at me now. But my strategy for *decades* has been "don't go there". And I don't think I'm alone in feeling that, right now, that's just not fucking good enough. 

So one of *my* motivations is to say to anyone reading this, there is a messy middle. There's always a messy middle, and if you want to find solutions, lasting ones, you need to give the messy middle space to express and explore itself. The tipping points in a system, at least the ones where fewer people die, are to be found in the complexity, not at the extremes. Occupying, or inhabiting, ambiguity does not make you a weak person or a weak thinker. In my experience, quite the reverse. 

And another is... this isn't going to be solved by military force, or, actually, force of any kind. I live in an intentional community which was founded with high ideals. It had a little of the attraction of a kibbutz about it (my dad still calls it The Kibbutz, and M wrote a blog called Wrong Kibbutz, which aimed to be exploratory but which went down like a bucket of cold sick with some of its founders) but we fell foul of all of the purist shit that idealism brings. Welcome to rural Lancashire, when a request for tinned sardines can get you accused of wanting to eat human fingers. Extremism is real everywhere, y'all. That's the real enemy. 

The secret is pluralist idealism, I reckon. All oppressed people have high dreams. Look for the ways the whole planet can express its whole self. Do no harm but take no shit. Keep upscaling your thinking -- what's the impact beyond what you can see? What do you want? What do you need? What would you settle for? What would the people you love settle for? What do you want the people you hate to settle for? (is it dialogue?) 

In any situation like this, there's asymmetry, and it's on the side with more power to move first and further. The longer a view you take with this one, the harder it is, but right now the onus is on Israel to cease and desist, and *then* insist on negotiation. They say you can't negotiate with terrorists, but you can try. Look at Northern Ireland. 

I'm not a hippie. I have many non-negotiables. But this isn't going to get fixed without a sea change, And I think a lot of the affected people in this conflict would countenance that, way more than a month ago. As the saying goes "They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds". 

I have one final thought, which isn't original, but none of this is original. Look to art. I've often thought about Dostoevsky's line "Beauty will save the world". Here's something Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knew more about pain and injustice than most of us ever will, said about this line in 1970 (source):

"One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

 I offer three more things which have helped me this last month: 

• From the daughter of a dictator -- if you can see it, do,
• Nina Simone's song I wish I knew how it would feel to be free
• The closing lines to a specific Billy Bragg song

Peace, bread, work and freedom, is the best we can achieve. Wearing badges is not enough, in days like these. 

joella

Heat and the male gaze

I dropped a note idly onto Facebook the other night. I say night, it was around 3 am, not long after I woke up on the sofa (classy, Jo, classy), tangled in my giant culottes and oversized top, and crawled upstairs to a not much cooler bedroom but one where I could starfish in my pants on my linen mix sheets and think about summers past. The note was about being told, when I was younger and it was this kind of hot, to put more clothes on. I wrote it because I often think 'I should say more about X', where X is a thing I'm thinking about, and then I forget. I even forget when I write the notes in a notes app, because when I do that, I use personal shorthand, like I'll know what I mean, but when I see it again, I generally don't. But if I say it on Facebook, it has to make sense to people, so it will make sense to me. Was my logic. Around 3 am. But actually, the sense it made to others was very different. It started an interesting conversation about the limits of being able to wear what you want, the consequences of wearing what you want, the things that affect what you want to wear. And it was a good conversation, but not the one I had been thinking about. 

Because the times I had been thinking about were the ones where the clothes they wanted me to put on were the ones *underneath* the ones I was already wearing. 

Even at my youngest and most exploitable, I never wore revealing clothing. This was partly because I have skin the colour of a milk bottle, and can *feel* it burning, even with sunblock on, and we didn't have sunblock when I was at my youngest and most exploitable. So I'm used to covering up. It was also partly because I was convinced, like many young women, that my body was deeply unattractive, not least because of the milk bottleness (these were the Miami Vice years and your tan was verrrry important). But it also became apparent to me that having a deeply unattractive body (I conceded in a diary from the time that my arms were "ok") the colour of a milk bottle did not seem to stop a certain level of attention being directed at me. I had a brutalist haircut and a totally flat chest till I was about 14, and was regularly taken for a boy, so it didn't start as soon as it might have, but start it did, as it in-evi-tab-ly does. So it was also partly to minimise that attention. 

I also identified as a feminist pretty early, became familiar with (if confused by) some of the core texts of the second wave, and was in some essential way drawn to the baggy t-shirt, leggings and DMs look. So all in all, you rarely saw my fleshy edges. 

But it was *a* look, of course, and often topped with wild, wild eyes. I'd say they were smoky but they were far less subtle than that. And my hair was enormous. I modelled myself on Robert Smith, learnt how to backcomb with an afro comb, and got through more cans of firm hold Silvikrin than the ozone layer could, it turns out, really deal with. I wore second hand men's clothes (grandad shirts from Oxfam, my dad's old suit jackets), mixed with a touch of goth and a bit of Miss Selfridge, hundreds of bangles and tons of make up. Look at me don't you dare look at me, this look said. 

I think, now, that when you're 15 or whatever, anything you wear is revealing, because you are open season for the next two decades and you're finding that out the hard way. But then, I was handling it, I thought. 

But here are three stories, the ones I was replaying the other night in the heat. 

1. I'm at school. 

My school was recently demolished. I wasn't sad. There exists some kind of vestigial presence, in the form of a) a merger with another school with a fancier building a little way down the coast, and b) the form of a Memories of Jo's School Facebook group, which I follow with some fascination. There really are people who hold those days as the best of their lives, who still have their blazers and their ties, who salvaged memorabilia up to and including the *curtains from the stage in the big hall which they made into curtains for their actual house*. I say people. I mean men. 

My school was not designed for girls. I'd personally argue it wasn't really designed for children, but I can be sure as eggs is eggs on the former statement because it had been going for the better part of a century*  before it let any of us in. And when we got there, I had the strong feeling it was under sufferance. There weren't very many of us, and they often bunched us together in lessons, especially science ones, as if we might warp some kind of laws of physics / biology / chemistry if we moved around too much. I was a proto blogger even then, and some of the things they said to us (collectively, en masse, as girls) would be genuinely fucking reportable these days. 

What they really wanted, I think (apart from our Oxbridge potential, mwa ha ha), was a sort of no mess no fuss arrangement. Girls can be such a civilising influence on the main story, no? And useful in plays. So, while there were almost no female teachers (they were an even smaller proportion of the teaching staff than we were of the school population, which is batshit if you think about it for any length of time at all), there was a Head of Girls. There was no Head of Boys, because boys were the norm. No, just Girls. For the right amount of fine wine (any) I will tell you about the Sanitary Towel Experience. But we're not here for that today, we're here for the summertime. 

The Head of Girls would call you in, if you were a Girl, for any of an unspecified number of Girl related infractions. These were almost exclusively to do with what you looked like (or occasionally, smelled like). One summer term the temperature reached the level when we were allowed to dispense with our green blazers, or, if we were in the Sixth Form, as I was by this point, our grey suit jackets. Fairly soon, I was called in. 

HoG: Do you have any idea what you look like? 

Me [I'm fifteen, I have more idea what I look like than at any point in my life before or since] : How do you mean? 

HoG: We can all see that you're not wearing a bra. 

Me: Um, ok? 

HoG: I want to see you in a bra tomorrow. 

Me: But... I don't need a bra? And it's hot? 

(I didn't need a bra. I didn't really have any bras at this point. But I did start wearing a bra. Even though it was hot). 

Some days later, I am called in again. 

HoG: What are you wearing under that shirt? 

Me: A... bra? 

HoG: It's black. We can all see it. 

Me: But... I thought the problem was that you could see that I wasn't wearing one? 

Now. I knew to a little tiny extent what I was doing here. I knew that no mess no fuss (white) girls wear nice white bras under their nice white shirts and I knew I was fucking with the HoG a bit. But I also profoundly believed that the person most upset by my lack of bra and/or visible bra was the HoG herself. I really did not *need* to wear a bra** at that point in my life. If the tiny breasts of late developers bother you, please, just don't look at them. If you want to look at them, that's on you. It's not the job of young women to police themselves. I have written about this before. 

2. I'm at work. 

I have left school, and am working in a restaurant kitchen over the summer. My job is the worst one in the building, I'm on wash up. I am very happy to have this job, as it enabled me to leave my previous job, in a bread shop which was run by sex pests. Nobody in the restaurant kitchen appears to be a sex pest, and this is progress. So I'm pretty cheerful, on the whole, as I load plates in and out of a red hot dishwasher and scrub pans in the sink. They bring me beers and fries. It's quite convivial. We all get a share of the tips. I'm gradually getting to do bits of other things - this is the place where I first see a whole cauliflower, learn how to peel garlic, and work out that I am a proper vegetarian. (This last part doesn't last, but I had to wash enough bloody chopping boards and scale enough sardines to see me through for a while). 

We all have some kind of uniform, and mine is a white overall with a long white apron. The chefs have whites, and the waiting staff are in white shirts, bow ties and the same long white apron. The aprons are also the tablecloths, from a laundry perspective it's pretty efficient. 

But it's really, really fucking hot in the wash up (which is a portacabin) that summer, and I basically stop wearing anything under my overall. (I mean, I wear pants, and usually leggings, but sometimes shorts). You can see where this is going. 

I must make it clear, I still had naff all by way of breasts. If you only met me during the last 30 years that may sound hard to believe, but honestly, they arrived fully formed the second I went on the Pill (and never went away). Before that, I used to own a badge that said 'Small Breasted Women Have Big Hearts'. (Might still be true, who knows). 

Anyway, there I am, in the sweaty Portacabin, washing up all of the things, swigging on a newly fashionable Becks, and in comes the boss. He's one of those shouty chefs, but he's not a bad man. I can sniff out the bad men by now, for I am seventeen and have met enough of them. 

Jo, he says. I need to say something. 

Sure! I say. Hot, isn't it? 

People are noticing... he says, that you're, well, not wearing anything under your overall. 

Philip! I say. I am wearing pants and leggings. 

That's not... what I mean, he says, but I know, and he knows I know. 

Who is bothered? I say. It's not like the customers see me. I'm just here, out the back, in the hottest place, doing pretty much the hottest job. 

He doesn't have an answer for me, and to his eternal credit, he leaves it be. 

Later that summer, maybe even that same week, there was a shift where it was so hot I was putting ice down the back of my neck and running my head under the tap. And then the weather broke and there was a thunderstorm and a massive downpour. I banged the dishwasher on, walked out the back door, and by the bins I pulled my overall open to the waist (it had poppers), threw my arms up to the sky and stayed there till I was rain-soaked and cold. Then I reassembled myself and went back in to get on with it. 

I imagined that I probably didn't look that different as I'd been soaked with sweat for hours (in a way that is coming back to me now in the menopause, weirdly) and I was bang-crashing away when I heard a little knock at the same back door. It was a boy maybe a year or two younger than me, absolutely scarlet faced, who'd been sent from the restaurant we shared our yard with to ask if they could borrow some garlic. I did suddenly realise that he must have seen me howling bare chested at the rain. I was really nice to him. 

3. I'm in hospital. 

Well, now I'm 22 years old. And I do have pretty decent sized breasts, I think I'm a C or D cup by this point. I'm travelling with my Significant Ex, and in Thailand we have a 'couples massage' where I take my (M&S basic, unpadded) bra off and the lady masseuses hold it up to the light and pass it around in incredulous, hilarious wonder. I have arrived, on the top half, and I dress accordingly. 

Somewhere in between Thailand and Malaysia, I contract something which may or may not be typhoid (I have had my jabs, so tests are inconclusive though my symptoms are consistent). I am actually pretty fucking ill, and after a long week of mad fever, weakness and dehydration, I end up in a teaching hospital in Kota Baharu. 

I have nothing but respect for the people who got me there (my SE himself, of course, but also the couple who ran the guest house we were staying in when I fell ill, and who cared for both of us and got me medical attention on an increasing level of intensity, including, ultimately, driving me to hospital. I sent them Christmas cards for over a decade). 

Anyway, here I am, on IV fluids and antibiotics, in a hospital ward I arrived in barely coherent. The ward is open to the air - by design - the walls are slatted, and I am starting to feel better. They have given me a hospital sarong outfit and I have worked out how to take myself to the squat toilets - the drip stand is fixed to the bed, so I have to hold the bag up with one hand and the sarong with the other (and if I get them the wrong way round and hold my bag up with my drip hand the blood comes out into the tube and I slide, faint down the wall till someone rescues me or I sort it out myself, anyway I generally manage it, and hang the drip bag on the hook in the bathroom stall and use both hands to hoik up my sarong to have a piss and then do it all again in reverse. 

It may or may not have been typhoid, as I say. One of the other things they thought it may have been is dengue fever - you get this from mosquitoes, and we'd spent a very bitey night on the floor of a train from Surat Thani. One of the symptoms of dengue fever is a rash on the chest. A steady stream of male doctors appeared at my bedside, asking to check for this. Honestly, I'd say, your colleague just looked, there's no rash. I think I'll just take a look, they'd say. Just to be sure. Fine, I'd say. I mean, it was company. 

But actually, this one isn't about my spotless breasts. On day, I don't know, three? I was in there for about a week I think, my Significant Ex turns up at visiting hour, bearing V8 juice and Marmite (I still love him for this) and I don't know... sanity? I'm definitely on the mend by this point and can see that on one level he's doing a lot of the heavy lifting, not least trying to stop my mum getting on a plane to Malaysia. We're both pretty sure that I'm not going to die, and we're kind of back in the game as a team. 

He is sitting next to my bed, and the husband of the woman opposite is sitting next to hers. She takes time every day, before visiting hour, to check her face and put a headscarf on. The husband calls my SE over. Words are exchanged. 

He comes back to me, pulling a face that says 'you're not going to like this'. 

What did he say? I ask. 

What he said was: tell your wife she is exposing herself. 

Dude. I'm in actual hospital. I'm on a drip. It's a women's ward. It's open to the actual air. I'm wearing the actual clothes they give women to wear in here. You have an issue because you can see my pants? Honestly, just don't fucking look. 

These little stories, over and over. These are just three. These are just mine. And it literally doesn't matter what you wear, so you might as well wear what you want. 

In the original conversation, someone asked me about the female gaze. I've been thinking, but I haven't got a lot to say about it really, at least not mine. Summer brings out the sort of man who likes to hang out in a beer garden with his top off. We see a lot of male flesh at this time of year. I generally mutter dear god, put some fucking clothes on, but I guess the same logic applies: if it bothers me, and often it does***, I take my gaze, and I avert it. 

joella

* I managed to top this by attending a Cambridge college that had been going for over four centuries before admitting women, and all I can say is it can be fun being a trailblazer, but you better not bleed anywhere.   

** These days I am pleased to see there are things called bralettes. I'm way past the market for them, but when I would have been, all we really had was A cup versions of the overengineered things most of our mums wore - mine would elaborately remove hers from under her top as soon as she sat down after tea (a useful skill, which I also have). There is progress. It does exist. 

*** I'm fine with actual naturism. It's the performative tatts out look that I struggle with. But your body, your choice. 

Lights are changing

I don't work on Fridays, as a rule. I generally use them to get things done (admin, digging, shopping) but I spent a good few hours of this one lying in bed, interspersing staring at the ceiling with staring at the wall. I associate this kind of lying around with grief, I did a fair amount of it after my mum died. And if I try to untangle the thoughts in my head, I think I am grieving. Not for anyone in particular, though I have read and heard stories over the last few weeks that have had tears rolling down my cheeks, and I have a few (#metoo) of my own. But for all of us who will never express our fullest humanity, never do our best work, because we are too scared. I'm going to be generous and include the men, even the ones who are very much not woke, because we are taught to be endlessly generous to the men, and I haven't run out of that yet. It's like Catholicism, never quite leaves you.

This stuff has been building for a year at least, since the US managed to elect a full strength no filter misogynist to the most powerful office in the world. History will damn them for that, if there are any of us left around to write it, but in the meantime we have to live with it, and the pressure is starting to build. The pussy grabber in chief seems fairly inviolable himself (he is the President, ergo his conduct is presidential, right?), but elsewhere, cracks are appearing in conspiracies of silence that have lasted near-lifetimes. And it's waking up all kinds of sleeping feelings.

(No content warning here apart from general fucking patriarchy, but I know it's been a hard month)

I think what set me off was the Hallowe'en episode of the new season of Stranger Things. It ended with the Ghostbusters song and suddenly (and unexpectedly) I wanted to cry. I was back on an overnight ferry to Rotterdam, in the autumn of 1985. I had just started my A-level Geography course and we were going on a field trip. There was a bar, and a dance floor, and I was a couple of Southern Comforts in (nobody bothered too much about underage drinking in those days) and Ghostbusters came on. And I *knew the moves*. So I was up and out there and giving it my all. Very enthusiastically, as I recall. At some point during the song, one of my schoolmates came and shouted in my ear. She said 'Joella*, stop it, you look like you're for sale'.

Seems weird that I remember this so clearly, but it was a proper Moment in my young life, and I do. I remember stopping my dancing, a little out of breath and a little sweaty, and wondering what on earth she meant. I remember looking down at myself, and I was wearing a white T-shirt tucked into a pair of (I now realise) terrible 80s jumbo cords, and bare feet - I still prefer to dance in bare feet. I probably didn't have a bra on, but I was a late developer and didn't have much to put into one at the time, and I could never really be arsed with them till I did. Then I looked around me, and I realised that everyone else who was dancing was a boy. I think that was her issue. That, and my inelegance maybe. I've never been a smooth mover.

But seriously, I was DOING THE GHOSTBUSTERS DANCE. I was FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. I was dancing with boys my own age, who were doing the SAME DANCE. It was FINE. None of them fancied me anyway, because I was stroppy and had no tits. We were CHILDREN.

I mean, I say that, but I had a Saturday job in a bread shop by then, and I'd already experienced (among other delights) its owner coming over while I was setting out the barmcakes, sticking his erection into my thigh and muttering 'if you were sixteen, I'd rape you'. I knew about the evil that men did, all fifteen year old girls do. I wasn't an idiot. But I was at a fucking disco on a fucking ferry getting a bit pissed and having a laugh, and I got policed by one of my own. That's what stayed with me. They make us police ourselves. Then it's even more our fault if something bad happens.**

I could tell you more about my schooldays but life's too short. I genuinely worry for people who see them as the best days of their life, and suspect most of them weren't girls. But whatevs. We grew on up and we grew on out. And we ended up in a world where versions of this self-policing are entirely normal: don't do this, don't wear that, don't go there.

For example. Some twenty years later, I was completing my plumbing NVQ, and installing a pretend bathroom in a workshop to get the requisite number of points. This required being in college in the daytime, with the apprentices doing their day release. It was educational, though none of them took the slightest notice of me. Apart from the only girl among them, who came to talk to me. How do I get them to leave me alone, she said. They never leave me alone.

Well, I said. I can tell you it gets better eventually, but in the meantime, the only thing I can say is, tie your hair back. Don't wear any make up to college or on site. Wear a crew neck top so they can't look down it when you're bending over, and find workwear trousers that fit you round the waist, so they can't look down those when you're installing your pretend bathroom. Don't flirt, don't giggle, and get the best marks. Basically, don't give them anything to work with.

What I *didn't* say was 'talk to the tutors and let them know you're uncomfortable', because they were my tutors too, and I knew it wouldn't have made any difference. It's on you to manage this, is basically what I said, and you will have to learn how to do it.

I might as well have said, don't look like you're for sale. Don't have any fun, don't play around and explore the power that you *do* have, don't mess with the programme. I thought I was giving sensible advice, and - given that not long before that I'd been squatting on top of an industrial fridge in a pub kitchen drilling holes in the wall for pipe clips and one of the chefs reached up in passing to squeeze the only part of me he could reach - arguably I was. He got my knee, which was his bad luck, as my trousers had kneepads, but seriously, you're out there, you're fair game, even when you're nearly 40, even in a fleece hoodie and steel toecaps and armed with a drill, even when your boss is two metres away.

But it's not the answer, is it. It just makes us all responsible for our own vulnerability, and that fucking stinks. These stories that are tumbling out now, piling up like snowdrifts, are the consequence of that. It's not like we haven't had feminism for decades, it just hasn't been enough. It still isn't. I feel a strange sense of shame that I've internalised all of this, developed my strategies, been grateful to get older and have to deal with it less, while more generations of girls grow up and go out into the world and find themselves needing to work out how to deal with something they should never have to experience, at best, and survive something much, much worse at worst. The stories from women in their 20s and 30s have made me rage. We should have sorted this shit out by now.

But this might be a moment that there's no going back from. We might get to smash a little bit of the patriarchy, finally. I hope I'm not too old to play my part in that. I'm certainly angry enough.

joella

tl;dr: (and related to the title of this post) oh my heart is sore at the moment. If yours is too, listen to this and it might help a little.

* Not actually Joella, but I don't go by the name they called me at school no more. 
** She went on to become Head Girl, and I, despite my "Oxbridge potential", subsequently realised, did not even get to be a prefect. I don't really know why (and at this point I really, really don't care) but I expect it was because of this kind of behaviour. They knocked my school down the other week, and I can't say I was sad. I always had the impression they never really wanted to let girls in in the first place, and they certainly didn't want ones who made any noise.