Observer Woman

Makes me spit...
This is actually the title of a very funny blog which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have been updated since 2007. It catalogues some of the particularly nauseating drivel perpetrated by that smug, vacuous waste of ink, the Observer Woman supplement.
Even my mum, who can still tolerate the Guardian, thinks Observer Woman is terrible.
And then today (hence a blog post about blogs which haven't been live for 2 years), OA sent me a link to another highly entertaining piece taking apart a particularly dreadful sounding Observer Woman article, in which some especially self-satisfied Londonista hack manages, with no apparent irony, to include herself in an article about Beautiful People. Hannah Betts. You can't fucking believe some people.
My personal brush with Observer Woman was pitching an interview piece about a fairly major woman writer to them. I was expecting to get knocked back, but this was in the days when I thought I wanted to be published in a broadsheet and hadn't realised that they pay late, pay badly, and despite the kudos are just as much tomorrow's litter tray liner as any other publication. What I wasn't expecting was that their response to the idea - the interviewee in question wasn't just a fairly significant player in late 60s/early 70s feminism and a reasonbly big name in various literary genres, but also had interesting things to say about issues like Jewish perspective on Palestine and Israel - was 'we've got a piece on feminism coming out in a couple of months.'
So, the position of the women's supplement for what purports to be Britain's main centre-left Sunday paper is that 'feminism' - defined as anyone vaguely feminist, or just not about clothes, makeup, cooking or, of course 'beautiful people' - is something to be covered, oooh, about twice a year. I knew there was a reason I can't even bear to read the Observer, let alone hand over cold hard cash for it.

Domestic green-ness

OK, this is probably all terribly middle-class and boring, but in the last few days I've had an interesting (to me, anyway) insight into barriers to taking steps towards more sustainable homes.
There is currently a disturbing amount of water coming through the (probably shoddily built, ageing) flat roof of our bathroom. The bitumen roofing is on its last legs, probably not helped by being pecked at by the evil bloody magpies which make me want to own an air rifle. And to be honest, the dripping has been getting steadily worse for quite some time, which just goes to show that Denial is not a good home management technique.
But anyway, having gritted my teeth and got some quotes, OA and I decided that we'd have to fork out to have the roof repaired, obviously. But finding that it was going to cost a lot less than we thought, we figured we'd also be good little green pioneers in the non-recycling zone that is Moss Side (though I bet our street's collective carbon footprint is about the same as one three-flying-holidays-a-year-recycling-every-week-Chorltonite), and have a green roof installed at the same time as the repairs.
It all looked like a fairly easy option - it would all be done in one go, the price would be about doubled but still come in at less than I feared the repairs alone would, and I did some copywriting for Natural Economy Northwest last year on the benefits of green roofs in terms of rainwater runoff, insulation and especially biodiversity, so it was something I was really keen on.
Then I happened to do a little extra websurfing, just to check some details, and realised that although having it put in place will mean very little for the overall height of our extension and will have lots of benefits, I would have to:
a) fork out a good 10-15% extra on the price of the ENTIRE project (not just the green roof bit) in building notice or building regulations applications, and
b) apply for planning permission - and when I saw that horror I didn't even get as far as checking out what the fee structure might be.
So, there you go, Manchester City Council and your Green Action Plan process - a nice concrete action you can take to encourage a measure that financially is within the reach of a fair number of householders (hell, I discovered the other day that I'm in the bottom 10% earning bracket nationwide) and isn't just good for the environment but quite simply makes places look nicer. Building regs and planning waivers. Not rocket science.

Reporting 'reality'

I have an interesting contrast in my head at the moment, between the attitudes of two women, both brave in their own way, to what kind of information it's important to report about world events.
On the one hand, we have the Kate Adie autobiography I'm reading. I have a certain amount of respect for Adie, for some of the places she's been risks she's taken and professional strides she's made in a pretty male-dominated environment. She's got some fairly odd views, particularly on feminism, but it's an account of an incident during her time reporting for the BBC in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s that interests me right now:

“I went into the hall and looked through into the front room. A small boy, seven or eight perhaps, was standing by the fireplace. 'Me Daddy,' he said to me immediately, 'me Daddy won't get up.' Under the Christmas tree was a man's body, awkwardly splayed.
...
You wonder what good reporting does, being at these events, a spectator, unable even to extend a reassuring arm because you feel such as intruder.
You go back to the office, with some pictures of a terraced house with a tiny hole in the front-room window made by a motorbike passenger's bullet, and type out a little list of facts: the only Protestant family who'd chosen to remain, the wife out working her nurse's night-shift, the name of the dead man.
You omit the Christmas tree and the little boy's words.”
[The Kindness of Strangers, Kate Adie, Hodder Headline 2002]

In complete contrast to this, at the moment I have the privilege of helping to edit my friend Sharyn's book for Pluto press, based on her writings from Gaza during the Israeli airstrikes and invasion of December and January just past and the months afterwards.
Working on her stuff is on one level a bloody nightmare, because it's so powerfully written and so desperately upsetting and trying to edit on-screen when your eyes keep tearing up is a right pain, and on another uplifting because of the strength and uprightness of spirit that just shines through from the people she writes about.
It rather makes me feel sorry for Kate Adie; she firmly asserts a good old-fashioned solid positivist idea of journalism, that there is A Truth somewhere which just presenting The Facts will somehow reveal. And as the incident with the little boy in Belfast seems to me to show, that reduces the news she devotedly puts (put) out on the BBC to list of numbers and the doings of the People Who Matter.
Adie also, at another point in the book, debates the extent to which journalists can and should allow what they feel about a situation to come through into what they report, and claims that when a journalist - at least a TV one - allows some sentiment to show, it's because they've been specifically given 'permission' to do so, because it suits the situation. The increasing number of such moments is, you feel, not something she sees as a positive development.
Obviously, if you are reporting news then there has to be some effort at fairness - at representing different sides of a story or versions of an event. But I've given up believing that it is possible for anyone to report anything truly 'neutrally.' The moment you decide what aspects of a story are or are not worth reporting, or whose quotes are or are not more reliable, you've taken a position. I'm not taking a completely relativist position, that anyone's views carry equal weight or are equally reliable, there will always be those with more knowledge or experience of a given situation, but once you start choosing between those who have any decently reportable level of information or opinion, you've taken a stance.
And I can't help thinking that 99% of the supposedly important news from those People Who Matter actually matters rather little – that another defunct peace plan or another empty set of climate change commitments that everyone involved knows will never by implemented or acted on – is actually pretty meaningless against something which actually impacts profoundly on the lives of a group of people – not just in terms of the depth of their immediate grief, but also of the decisions they will make in the future.
Those agreements and treaties made by governments and so on may provide the framework within which other events may occur, but if it wasn't for the pain and rage, or the dignity and mercy and compassion, of the ordinary people under the boot-heels of the Matterers then those agreement and treaties would mean nothing. You can't understand the pieces of paper without the blood and shrapnel and tears, and you can't implement it, whatever it says, without fear or hate or loyalty or belief that makes people kill and be killed. In the end, a string of mouldering official documents in some archive (as reported by Kate Adie) will mean very little if someone (like Sharyn) hasn't recorded the grief and anger of the little boy – in Belfast, or in Gaza City – that will drive the next turn of the wheel.

Egypt and Israel: hand in hand to crush the Palestinians

There is an enduring myth amongst many Palestine solidarity campaigners that there is a single anti-Palestinian force, Israel, and that despite the odd blip, Arab/Muslim states are basically on-side. My own experiences of the Jordanian and - most recently and frustratingly - Syrian authorities have taught me that this is far from true, but I've tended to put it by on the basis that I can understand why they might be suspicious of some random white woman bimbling round the Middle East in an unaffiliated kind of way.
But the following terrifically powerful and horrible account of the brutality of the Egyptian forces at the Rafah crossing out of Gaza is a graphic illustration of how completely Egypt is happy to collaborate with Israel to crush the people of Gaza. The FreeGaza Movement is appealing for people to contact their own governments and that of Egypt to demand that Jenny and Natalie of FreeGaza/ISM and all Palestinians wanting to cross through Rafah are allowed to do so.

"WHO WILL HOLD US ACCOUNTABLE?"
Natalie Abou Shakra, The Electronic Intifada, 15 July 2009

I will never forget the image of the elderly woman whose son was dying in a hospital in Egypt. She only wanted to be with him. Crying, her hand touching the glass window of the office of the Egyptian intelligence services, she pleaded, "Please, please. I beg you, show mercy, let me go in." Another woman sat by the State Security office, looking up at an officer blocking her path. "You promised to let me in," she said with her soft, tired and drained voice. "Please let me in" she repeated calmly with her tired voice, then she looked at me with wide, tearful, sad eyes.

I came to Gaza a week before Israel's winter invasion began. After seven months, I spent two days at Rafah crossing with the Egyptian authorities refusing to allow me to return to Lebanon, despite having all the necessary coordination documents, approval and permission from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Egyptian authorities made people wait in the arrival hall at the Rafah crossing, sitting on filthy floors where names for either the entry to Egypt or to return to Gaza were called by the voices of aggressive Egyptian police officers, or state security or intelligence personnel. After hours of waiting, two officers headed towards us: "you are being returned to Gaza." "No!" we would reply, "We have coordination documents!" But, the officers and intelligence personnel grew angrier and threw the papers in our faces humiliatingly: "This means nothing! Move on! Hurry!"

After being asked numerous times "what were you doing in Palestine for seven months," I answered the intelligence officer simply, "what you didn't do." Another officer asked, "How did you come to Gaza?" "By the boats" I replied, referring to the Free Gaza Movement ship that brought me. "So, now you know why you ... can't leave," he answered back.

It was a simple message to the Free Gaza Movement and anyone hoping to break the siege: they and the Palestinians will be punished. Yet, it must be done, something must be said, this injustice cannot be allowed to stand in silence, whatever the price. And there is a huge price to pay -- that of not being able to go back.

As I was explaining the situation to someone on the phone, a sick, elderly Palestinian man fell to the ground unconscious. I approached as a state security officer began dragging the elderly man across the floor. I was intercepted by Said, the intelligence officer, who pointed his finger at me and said in a cruel and wicked tone, "I will make sure you will never get out of here." I countered, quoting the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, "all that you have done to our people is registered in notebooks." He replied in a vindictive tone, "Really? Who will hold us accountable?"

I watched as my International Solidarity Movement (ISM) colleague Jenny was dragged across the floor by security officers screaming, "Get off of me! Get off of me!" I watched her disappear behind a wall as I clung to a window and the officers came for me. I looked at each of the men in the eye, knowing I had to humanize them to humanize myself. I asked them, "You have a daughter my age? I am 21." There was no reply. I tried again, "Would you accept your daughter being treated this way? I am your daughter, and your daughter and your daughter." I was pulled away by my wrists and dragged along the dirty floor, and the man dragging me said, "You are lucky my shoe is not in your mouth."

At Rafah, I saw a voiceless Palestinian man in a wheelchair being pulled and shaken. I watched women begging on their knees, children and the elderly sitting on dirty floors. And all us were dragged by the Egyptian security officers and thrown out.

At Rafah I also saw laughter and love. A little girl on a bus asked her mother, "Can we gather a shekel from each to give to the Egyptians to pass through?" I watched as people shared bread and water, share laughter as well as pain and tears. Yes, we laughed. Laughter and love under the bombs, to laugh and love under racism, degradation, humiliation, by monsters clad in the uniforms of a brotherly Arab state.

Coming from Lebanon to Gaza initially seemed surreal. Larnaca, Cyprus was the checkpoint, and the sea was the road to Palestine. In the beginning, breaking the siege was all that came to mind. It was almost three years to the medieval, hermetic siege that the apartheid state of Israel had imposed on Gaza's million and a half residents. All I thought of then was: Israel, the occupation, the monster. But, the monster, as I later became aware, was not one but many, who were all devouring the souls of Palestinians in Gaza. The official Arab regimes were sharing the crimes that Israel was committing. These regimes, especially Egypt, are not complicit -- their participation is direct, clear, observable, noticeable, felt and lived directly, and therefore has transcended complicity into direct participation.

In Gaza, I have lived the "quintessential Palestinian experience." I have lived a nakba, a man-made disaster, a disease of hatred, racism to the bone. In Gaza, I have
lived under occupation, a brutal, savage blockade. The epitome of the Palestinian experience comes in what historian Rashid Khalidi says is lived "at a border, an airport, a checkpoint ... at any one of those modern barriers where identities are checked and verified." It is what the eminent Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani
described in Men in the Sun. It is Laila El-Haddad's description of how she and her children lived suspended, humiliated, and stranded in a Cairo airport waiting and wanting to return home to Gaza.

It is the experience of every Palestinian. I became a Gazan -- I am now a refugee, a prisoner. I am now, as El-Haddad explained, holding a passport "that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry ... to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identification."

I came to stand with the suffering, besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I came to learn from their resistance, in all its forms, and to fight hand in hand with local activists in acts of non-violent civil resistance. After all, I came from a supposed "resisting Lebanon" and therefore, resistance was no stranger to me. I came to Gaza to confront the occupation and know it through a window other than that of the biased petrol-dollar media of our times. And I did.

I learned that the Arab regimes were Israel's best friends in the region, not out of love of the colonizer, but out of the intense hatred they hold for the Palestinians and their own people. Oh, Palestinians, you are on your own! Where has the cause of Jerusalem gone? It was certainly not in the eyes, hearts and minds of those intelligence agents and members of the security services based at the Rafah crossing, one of Gaza prison's gates. All I could find there was hate.

The psychological and physical torture Palestinians are subjected to at the Rafah crossing is a clear message from the Egyptian authorities. It is intended to frighten and punish the Palestinian people and all those who stand in solidarity with them. The Egyptian authorities at the crossing violated our basic human rights, a daily reality for Palestinians. The degrading and the humiliating manner in which we were treated also violated our rights as women.

During my time in Gaza, as in July 2006 in Lebanon, I endured a hellish assault and massacre designed to break a people but which once again only revealed the criminality of the apartheid regime and the complicity of the international community. Gaza is our South Africa, our Guernica. The Palestinian people exceed their unworthy leadership, and if there is a victory it is that of the people who endured, who drank tea above the rubble of their destroyed homes, who still stand up high, steadfastly against their uprooted olive trees, against occupation, betrayal, complicit silence, and neglect.

Natalie Abou Shakra is an activist from Lebanon and is affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement and Free Gaza Movement. She defied Israeli orders for Lebanese citizens not to go to Gaza and was able to get in with the Free Gaza movement's SS Dignity on the 20 December, 2008.

Copenhagen wheeze

Sometimes, PR folks just really, really fail to Get It. A prime example of this turned up in my email inbox today: a press release from the Danish tourist board promoting the country as a ecotourism destination during the Copenhagen climate change summit this autumn. As a sop to the environmental interests they're trying to tap into, the release's writers did suggest that:

"Those inspired by the Danes’ low-impact lifestyle can follow the ‘flight-free’ route by visiting the country by sea. DFDS Seaways (www.dfds.co.uk) offers a regular service of overnight departures between Harwich and Esbjerg, with prices starting from £222, based on two people and one car travelling one way with a sea view cabin."

Getting back to the Real World, however, they then followed it with:

"Alternatively, fly Norwegian airlines (www.norwegian.com), Ryanair (www.ryanair.com), bmi (www.flybmi.com or SAS Scandinavian Airlines (www.flysas.co.uk) to various Danish gateways from several UK airports and opt to offset your flight’s carbon emissions..."

Humans. What can you do.

Palestine as the Philippines...

A friend sent me this recently, with the following message:
"This map is, to my mind, the most effective work I've seen explaining just how - well - archipelago-ised the West Bank is, what an impossibility political and social entity it is forced to be. It's done in this dream like manner that makes the physical discontinuity of the areas clearer than ANYTHING I've seen OCHA or ICAHD or any other mapping folk achieve, because it's so simple."
It certainly shows the shocking extent to which Israel has reduced the West Bank to a multitude of tiny, discontinuous areas that could never form the basis of a viable two-state solution. It's from http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/270-palestines-island-paradise-now-with-a-word-from-its-creator/ I suppose the only thing missing is a load of armed forces stopping people from moving between some of the islands...