Palestinian police await a German parliamentarian, Bethlehem. Sidewalk cafe, Boxhagenerplatz.

Discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Italy is highly unique. It’s complicated, on the one hand by Italy’s own recent colonial history in the Middle East (Libya), and its burgeoning Arab population on the other.

I’m working on a series of essays trying to tackle the subject, in non-traditional ways. One avenue I’m working on is film. This is a screen shot from Pasolini’s brilliant Sopralluoghi in Palestina, shot in Israel in the early 1960s.

About half way through the documentary, the legendary director says something to the effect of “It’s not Biblical enough here.”

Anti-Flag wasn’t allowed into Ramallah. Malpensa airport gift shop, 12/17.

The unrest presently taking place in Jerusalem is making itself felt abroad. On Saturday, members of the local Palestinian community held a demonstration in front of Milano Centrale. Note the Italian flag in the mix.

Yesterday, I went to a local internet cafe to fax a copy of my Israeli passport’s first three pages to my parents. In the midst of transferring the title of my stepmother’s Opel station wagon to me, they needed proof of Israeli identification.

Handing over the paperwork to the cafe’s Somali owner, I noticed this wall display behind him. “Who do you think is the election’s winner?” the guy asked, as he took note of the Hebrew-language documentation I had given him.

Whenever I’m in London, I think of Michael Jackson, the Bible, and Gaza. At the same time.

There’s a story I never finish. Every year, I write a new draft, and somehow lose it. It’s about visiting my senile grandmother in a nursing home in east Jerusalem in April 1977. Not just any nursing home, but a converted  Jordanian army barracks, replete with falling plaster and broken pipes. The works.

At least half the patients are elderly Arab men in wheelchairs. Everyone is speaking a different language, including my Palestinian Jewish grandmother, who, for the first time ever, addresses me in fluent German, while her roommate, a giant Armenian woman, insists over and over again, in French, that she is Napoleon.

Imagine being transported thirty-one years back in time, in London, at an installation by two Chinese artists, at the new Saatchi Gallery on Kings Road. The photograph above says it. all.

Political insight is almost always far-sighted, and the Americans who invest their energy in worrying about the Israel-Palestine conflict are no exception. It is no accident that leftists in the United States started paying closer attention to that topic right when the American government, preoccupied with its own agenda, stopped doing so. The Bush Administration’s hands-off approach to the conflict, in sharp contrast to that of the administrations that preceded it, cried out for initiatives to be undertaken in civil society.

It wasn’t just the Bush Administration’s neglect of the Israel-Palestine conflict that elevated it to a central cause of the post-9/11 American Left, of course. But it sure helped. Indeed, as much anger as the Administration’s approach to the region inspired, that neglect may have been more influential in the end, for what it cleared was a pathway to intervention. Progressives were already struggling with a profoundly limited sense of agency. In the absence of government involvement, however, they found it easier to imagine their actions having a direct effect on the situation in Israel and Palestine. From this perspective, the absence of official interference actually seemed to be as much a blessing as a curse.

As the decade wore on, American political opinions about the conflict appeared to be significantly less hampered by the poorly informed provincialism that both Israelis and Europeans have long ascribed to the United States. Whether or not one agrees with the positions that Americans started adopting as a consequence of their interest in the topic is not important. What matters is that we take that investment seriously, understanding that it is the result of the Middle East’s increasing prominence in the psychological life of the United States.

-Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

This is our local grocery store. We try not to shop there too often because it’s expensive, and offers a fairly unimaginative selection of coffees. But, being four blocks away, it still has it’s value. Such as when, fact-checking an article about the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cell in Nablus last summer for a magazine, I ran into a friend who had just spent a month working with an NGO in the West Bank city.

"The author identifies the head of the local ‘Brigade crew," I told Rebecca when I saw her, dropping the name given to the commander. "You must have run into those people with some frequency when you were there. Does it ring a bell?" I asked. Laughing, she gently replied, "No, of course not. That’s definitely not the guy’s name, and besides, I couldn’t pin a pseudonym on him if I tried."

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, it is worth putting certain facts into perspective. Until the 2003 invasion, it was assumed that the 1948 Arab-Israeli war had created the region’s largest and most significant refugee crisis, sending an estimated 750,000 Palestinians into exile.

According to figures made available by news agencies, over the past five years, the US occupation of Iraq has turned over 4 million of the country’s citizens into refugees. In an article published by the Associated Press on Monday, it is estimated that two million of these refugees are internal, with the rest spread around the region.

Separated by 60 years, and different national contexts, there are as many reasons to not assimilate these events as there are for comparing them. From an Israeli perspective, however, given the tragic legacy that the Palestinian refugee crisis has bequeathed the region, the Americans would be well advised to learn from precedent.

This post is also published on allvoices.com