Palestinian Sign Language

Here is the link to the news story that inspired this post:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/palestinian-wakes-up-to-find-his-innocent-facebook-photo-use

Courtesy of Mohammed AlQadi

When you stop to think about it, numbers have a meaning and a power beyond their original numerical value. In its most basic sense a number refers to a physical entity whose repetitiveness imbues that number with its meaning. That was what numbers originally signified. Then came the Indians and started meditating on those numbers while doing their yoga, trying to fill their minds with void. Lo and behold, numbers suddenly had their own independent existence that one could manipulate, aggregate and disaggregate, fiddle with and twist into different sequences and formulas. This inevitably led to the all-encompassing infinity, the endless concept with no substance to limit its possibilities. From there the Indian mind reversed back to Zero, the mother of all abstract thinking, which the Indians bequeathed to the Arabs.

That, in a nutshell, was the root of Israel’s problem with the Palestinians: Not only that they knew how to count but also that they were comfortable with zero. They claimed it as the basis of their practice of resistance, their famous Sumoud or perseverance: You have nothing, do nothing and get zero from the international community; you just sit still and wait expecting nothing. But also, as part of the Arab Semitic people, the Palestinians had the peculiar habit of using their hands to say things. It started with their closing their fist and extending the index finger straight to give witness to the unity of the creator. Whether praying, meditating or preparing to die, they would be seen making that sign. Such Palestinian pious pretensions didn’t fool us. We Israelis knew intuitively what the one finger sign meant. True, we weren’t about to start documenting which finger those sneaks were using: “As soon as our soldiers would look away, even in the midst of prayer a Palestinian would switch from the index to the middle finger,” The official IDF spokeswomen said. “Even under the strictest of security measures they would give us the ‘up-yours’ sign. You look back at one of them and he or, even worse, she would beat you to it and switch back to the index finger pretending to be deep in communion with Allah. But then, Allah probably would give us the middle finger sign if only we could see Him. But you just wait. Our Yahweh will get Him sooner or later.”

Then came the First Intifada and the whole world colluded with the Palestinians by opening its media to let their criminal youth into living rooms around the globe. And what did the little terrorists do but use the world’s innocence to their advantage showing the two finger sign under the guise of making the V-sign as if for victory. But we knew the way their dirty minds worked. Our analysts figured out their thoughts even before they conceived them. We knew instinctively that they were using England’s code signals to say to us the F-word. You go figure which way they turned their hand as they made that signal. We knew they all meant to turn its back to us as in the original English tradition not the palm side as in the V for victory. That was why our peace campaigner, Rabin, issued his order to pardon all those creeps and only to break their arms so they won’t raise them with the vulgar sign again. Arafat himself played along and imitated Nixon and Churchill with that V-sign for victory while deep in his heart he knew that they too were saying ‘up yours’ to the whole world.

And then the Palestinians started scheming to abduct three of our boys while on a hike. They began more than a year in advance and enlisted the services of the world media on which they have a monopoly as we all know. Can you imagine a more sordid trick than to use the well-tested method of hiding in full view of the whole world? Here they were signaling their plan to abduct three of our settlers, using the three finger sign of course and passing the information across the entire Arab world in the guise of the number they connived to assign to Mohammad Assaf as a contestant in the Arab Idol song fest. Imagine a Gazan refugee winning in a civilized singing competition! Where would he have studied music and voice? Did he start with imitating the sound of a sick camel or the screams of hungry camp orphs? But he won that competition on the strength of the popularity of their planned crime. There was hardly a Palestinian man or woman, adult or child, in or out of jail who didn’t raise his hand with the three extended fingers in support of the abduction scheme.

They may well be geniuses in connivance and trickery but they are poor in math. They must have figured that if they were to get the same thousand-to-one prisoner exchange rate as they had with Gelad Shalit then three of our youth would be enough to free all their prisoners. They knew we had some five thousand Palestinian prisoners in our jails. But they must have figured that 1000 X 3 > 5000. Believe me I have meditated on that one for a long time and I can’t get it to work. Perhaps they do their calculations on basis of volume. Might that be why so many Palestinian prisoners have started fasting in preparation for the coming exchange, I wonder? Or it must be that, in their simple-minded calculations, they count every two or three children as one adult prisoner. But that formula doesn’t work. even if we were to subtract all 700 Palestinian children that we arrest every year, 99.74% of whom we convict in our military courts. I told you we know what they think before they even think it, those slow Arabs, and we manage to beat an admission of guilt out of their dirty little minds every time.

And about those 10 and 11-year old children of theirs: You must think that we have no right to abduct them out of their beds at night. But you can quote me on this matter: "I am not racist but it is necessary to kill them from the moment they are born." http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/kill-palestinian-every-hour-says-new-israeli-facebook-page Every Palestinian squatting in our promised land commits a crime against us every time he or she breathes. They consume the oxygen our future generations need.

Got it straight now? You tell me how many fingers I should give.

A Swim with Mohammad Assaf

“On this earth what deserves living for,” Mahmoud Darwish wrote. I just watched a video on You-tube of the Palestinian singer Mohammad Assaf, nicknamed by the judges of the pan-Arab competition, Arab Idol 2013, ‘the Rocket’ – a rocket of peace, they were careful to stress-- performing his signal song “Alli el-kuffyeh” from the night before he won the title. I cried all through it. Here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj-pyJF6ckU

But you have to speak the Palestinian dialect of Arabic to really appreciate the full impact of what this Palestinian refugee sings. An audience of some 150 million watched of whom 65 million voted for the 23 year old idol. Here is my translation of the opening stanza:

By God, the letters of the homeland are like a necklace over a beautiful chest:

The F (fa’a) is for beloved Palestine. Oh how dear is the homeland; how dear it is!

The L (lam) is for the time when they united and how powerful was the stone.

The S (seen) is the question of the prisoner: when will I gain liberty?

The T (Ta) is the rise of the full moon over the martyr in his grave.

The I (ya’a) is how sweet is the ingathering of the diaspora.

The N (noon) is the light of the prophet as he treads in Jerusalem.

And that is only the opening! He follows that with the refrain, a joyous call to twirl the kuffyeh high in dance and jubilation. Two birds with one stone: the kuffyeh is the emblem of Palestinian pride and, especially since the first Intifada, it has come to signify resistance and revolution to youth the world over. In Assaf’s voice and with his charisma, the mix of nationalist sentiment and invitation to dance is pure magic. It is surely what Mahmoud Darwish spoke of. The most appropriate scream that struggled to escape my throat on hearing it was a loud “Allahu Akbar!” in praise of Assaf’s creator. But one has to be careful. Just the day before, a poor Sephardic man was riddled with bullets by a guard at the Western Wall for shouting that.

“I waited 30 years to see the Palestinian flag waved in Nazareth in something that is not a demonstration,” Sally Azzam, our Nazarene friend, noted on Facebook. She wished her baby had seen it. The split TV screen showed the celebrating Palestinian crowds in three different cities: Ramallah, Gaza and Nazareth in addition to the pan-Arab crowd on location in Beirut for the announcement of the winner of the Arab Idol competition. Another friend noted that one almost forgets that they could not exchange visits; the occupation keeps them apart. A fourth Palestinian locale, Jerusalem, was not even present on screen. The police there threatened violence early in the evening and carried out the threat to quell the enthusiasm of the celebrating crowd as the announcement of Mohammad Assaf as the winner was broadcast. In fact Fox News eliminated both Jerusalem and Nazareth from its report of the event altogether. What do Israeli citizens have to do with a Palestinian celebration anyway?

I had spent the evening with the family of a nephew. Their satellite dish catches MBC-1, the Saudi-owned station in Beirut that doesn’t seem to mind Western-style exposure of shoulders and other bodily attractions short of “that which God has forbidden.” Going by the stations standards, He apparently forbids little in the way of body parts. At any rate, I had spent most of the day tending my garden. I am spoiled, I know. My wife and I enjoy a plot of land that had come down to me through a long string of ancestors. It would have accommodated thirty people had it been located in Gaza. My back ached and I claimed the choice seat in the crowded living room of my nephew, stretched out in it and proceeded to perform relaxing exercises for my back muscles. Soon, I found myself dozing off between the ruckus highlights of the evening. The two pre-teen boys of the hosting family jumped and screamed their excited approval and encouragement every time Assaf came on screen or his name was mentioned. I am no music critic. My vote went to the Syrian woman competitor, Farah: for one thing, I am partial to young women and the charm of their lilting voices. For another, Syria needs a pleasant surprise no less than Palestine. The third finalist was Ahmad Jamal, an Egyptian with talent. But he risks being outlawed if he wins. At least Mohammad Assaf, when he was warned against continuing his sacrilegious practice of singing at penalty of loosing his prison ID in Gaza, was offered alternative accommodations in the wider facility in the West Bank contracted out by Israel to the PLO and its president Abbas. The long and short of his crime is that his singing preoccupies good Moslems from the worship of God. Now that he had become the Arab “idol,” he is in direct and open competition. Apropos the strict rules of the religion, a nephew whispered to me the essence of a new fatwa he heard: observant women should sit cross-legged on the floor and not on chairs. Sitting on a chair or a couch is conducive to relaxing and letting ones legs split apart, which is an open invitation to the devil. Could they have read my secret thoughts, I wondered?

Muhammad Assaf is already a legend. To hear young Palestinians speak of him you would think he were the young JFK winning the USA presidency. A mature nephew of mine quoted a distant relative of his who had taken part together with Assaf two years ago in a national level singing competition:

“He was the best, absolutely the best. But they had to disqualify him early because it was too much trouble to provide him with all the needed documents every time he came to Bethlehem to compete.”

A second young man related the via dolorosa of Assaf in the current competition. The Israeli authorities had held him back so long that it was already too late. When he arrived in Cairo the gate to the enclosure housing the studio was already closed. He begged the guard and explained his plight to no avail. So he climbed over the wall, a usual feat for Gazan refugees. And Beirut is calm enough these days: guards don’t shoot Palestinian ‘infiltrators’ at will there. But the studio had run out of numbers for additional contestants. A fellow Palestinian who knew how good Assaf was, gave him his number. And that is how he entered the competition.

A cynical colleague expressed the fear that Israel may choose to assassinate a few Palestinian leaders while no one is looking. Now that Assaf has won I worry more about him. For one thing, JFK was assassinated. For another, Palestinian history is rich with rubbed-off prominent artists. Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Elali come to mind. And like in their cases, a Palestinian hand will be implicated in the murder regardless how obvious the Mossad’s behind the scenes role is. Mind you, I am careful: I am not making any claim, direct, implied or allegorical, about the case of JFK. Never mind Robert’s case.

Muhammad Assaf is truly a phenomenon. Except that he is your usual Palestinian phenomenon: a refugee born to refugee parents temporarily exiled to Misrata, Libya, from their camp in Gaza, where they had successfully competed for enough air to breath in the most densely populated spot on earth. He attained normal physical growth, albeit of the thin build type, on the typical daily ration of 2279 calories of the Israeli enforced Gazan style diet and learned to turn his life’s challenges to opportunities.

As best as I can figure it out the boy sang from as early as any one in his family can remember. It apparently started with his childhood cries of pain and hunger to which few paid attention, and those who did had no recourse to corrective steps to alleviate the distress. So the kid turned his cries to songs of longing, perhaps at first for food and later for romance and company. As his Adam’s apple burst to full bloom, he flavored his longstanding yearning and dreams of return to his family’s much glorified paradise in pre-Nakba rural Palestine with a touch of testosterone. With that he converted his trans-generationally transmitted memories of Palestine absent Zionism and Wahhabi religiosity into a more suitable teenage dream of frolicking with age mates of both sexes in the lap of spring season in Palestinian. And, lo and behold, it worked! ‘Alli el-kuffyeh’ was born and there was hardly an Arab teenage girl, let alone Palestinian ones, who had a bed of her own to sleep on who didn’t dream of Assaf in it. Nancy Ajram is a superstar and one of the four judges of the competition. But she is the kind of judge I wouldn’t mind condemning me to the gallows just so I could claim a relationship with her. I swear I caught Nancy on screen offering Assaf a free swim in the emerald green sea of her eyes and beyond.

I dozed off doing laps in the shallows. I woke up to my two young grand nephews dancing wildly with their chairs raised over their heads for lack of dance partners. Chairs! What perverts!