I'm back - and it's Miss Williams now!

After four years away I am returning to blogging. Why have I been quiet for four years? I became a teacher...

Anybody who has ever been a teacher will understand. Four years in and I have only just managed to find a minute! I love teaching, not because of the holidays (of which I spend most of the time preparing to go back to work or sleeping off a run of 60 hour weeks), but because every day I get to shape people. I get to show people something they don't yet know. I get to help people find a better way to approach a problem. I get to assist in making people become more tolerant, well rounded, more confident people.

While training as a teacher; tired, stressed, skinny on black coffee and no time for dinner, I read this quote by Dr Haim Ginott:

'I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.'

As teachers, parents (the very first teachers) and those who work with children and young people, we wield immense power. We get to shape the adults of the future while they are still malleable and open to whatever we are willing to show them. The people who will be in charge tomorrow, learn from us today how to be and who to be. Our every action and reaction; all that we model through our own behaviour is absorbed. That is power.

When I was a child (and even into my early twenties) if you had asked me what my goal was, I would have told you that I wanted to change the world. I imagined myself as an esteemed leader, fixing the wrongs of a broken planet one by one. I was 25 when I became a teacher and I discovered that I had given myself a gift; the power to change the world. I know now that change happens slowly and nobody does it alone, but each year I have got to play some part in shaping 30 people. I got to decide the weather in the classroom, I got to instill knowledge and understanding - not just of the curriculum - of life, of forgiveness, of self-respect.

I didn't become an ambassador. I didn't go to work at the UN. I haven't solved the problems of hunger, war or inequality. But so far I have taught 120 children about these issues and others that are close to my heart. I hope and believe that some of what they have learned will stick and will shape in some way how those 120 children view the world and their place within it.

I do hope that I can manage to balance interests like writing on my blog with teaching, now that I am four years in and I've learned a few tricks. But if I disappear again, it's not because I've been knocked over, I'm just busy changing the world.

Ridding The West Bank of Palestinians

In Israel new laws have come into force, allowing the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from The West Bank. The Israeli Military now has the right to expel or imprison, for up to 7 years, anyone living in the West Bank without a valid residency permit. This law, designed to target “Infiltrators” makes it illegal for Palestinians born in Gaza or outside of the Occupied Palestinian Territories to live in the West Bank, unless they have been issued a permit by the Israeli authorities. This applies even to those who are married to residents of The West Bank and have children there.

It is mainly those registered as residents of Gaza, who will be targeted by this policy, which will see people who have lived for decades in The West Bank separated from their homes, jobs and families. According to Palestinian estimates up to 70,000 people could be evicted from the West Bank for failing to possess the right documentation. Israel is in charge of issuing this documentation and has consistently refused to update peoples’ residency details. It has now made criminals of tens of thousands of people, who simply moved from one Palestinian Territory to another.
Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations have condemned the move. Sari Bashi, of ‘The Gisha Centre for Freedom of Movement’ states that the removal of Palestinians from the West Bank is illegal because “a Palestinian resident does not need a permit to be present in the Palestinian territories.” She goes on to state that the removal of one family member to Gaza generally leads to the rest of the family following.

Gaza is downing under an Israeli imposed blockade, yet this policy will see more people pushed into one of the most densely populated areas of land in the world. Gaza, home to 1.4 million, has been under a blockade since 2007. The blockade prevents any trade passing between Israel and Gaza. Humanitarian aid enters Gaza from Israel, but aid supplied by the United Nations (UN) is regularly turned away because items such as blankets, clothing, candles and light bulbs are deemed security risks.

Gaza’s industry has collapsed and its ports have closed because Gazans cannot trade their goods beyond the thin strip of land that they are blockaded within. Hospitals struggle to survive on the humanitarian supplies that are allowed in and there are regular power cuts, routinely endangering the lives of patients reliant on ventilators and life support.

The blockade prevents building supplies entering the Gaza Strip, impeding the ability to rebuild homes schools and hospitals destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2008/9. Even the UN has had to freeze rebuilding projects because of lack of construction supplies.

UN Chief Ban Ki-Moon expressed his dismay at Israel’s policy on Gaza as causing “unacceptable hardships” to its people, 80% of whom live in poverty. Shrinking legitimate employment prospects, push many young people into the only industry still available to them, smuggling products from Egypt. They do this by passing through illegally built and highly dangerous tunnels that regularly collapse and claim the lives of smugglers.

Gaza is scratching at the surface of survival. It simply cannot absorb more human beings. One may ask why Israel would choose to move people from The West Bank, where they are living self-sufficiently and relatively peacefully, to Gaza, where they will be reliant on aid and living under the rule of Hamas. According to Sari Bashi, the answer is simple. This is an attempt to “rid the West Bank of Palestinians”, therefore freeing up more Palestinian land for annexation by Israel.

White Families Adopting Black Football Stars

I watch films with a pretty cynical eye, so when I went to see The Blind Side, I did sit there wondering how much was true and how much was overdramatic Hollywood mozzarella. There was a point where something went crunch and the cynical part of my brain went “oh, that’s why they became the legal guardians of a 17 year old boy from the projects.” Then my sentimental voice overpowered my cynical one and I convinced myself that they just loved him. His sporting talents and the prospect of profiting from them had no influence on their decision to rescue him from his horrible life. They were rich already anyway (not that that makes people less greedy).

When I was googling the character, wondering if there is a new American trend, as was implied in the film, of wealthy white families adopting children from the projects, who happen to show sporting talent, I came across an article written by political activist Tim Wise that dated back to 2004. It was about a young man called Marcus Dixon, from Georgia, who was imprisoned for having sex with a minor. He was an 18 year old A grade student who had been awarded a sports scholarship to join a prestigious university. He was also a young black man, under the care of a white family. Dixon’s mother was imprisoned on drug related charges when he was eleven, so the Jones took him in.

Seven years later Dixon was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, for having sex with a 15 year old girl. Accused of rape, sexual battery, aggravated assault and false imprisonment he was found not guilty. However, having been advised by his adoptive mother to tell the police “anything they wanted to know" he never denied having sex with this girl. He was found guilty of statutory rape and because the girl had “injuries” (the Guardian claimed these injuries were bruises and a cut lip, other sources claim it was having lost her virginity), he was found guilty of aggravated child molestation, which carries a ten year minimum sentence. It was the first time this charge had been brought against a man less than three years older than the alleged victim. But Dixon was a young black man and his accuser was a white girl, with a racist father.

Dixon’s case became very high profile, smacking of a racist conspiracy, and a little over a year after the crime was purported to have taken place, the charge of aggravated child molestation was overturned, and he was released from prison. The charge of statutory rape was upheld. Dixon is now a very wealthy football player for the Dallas Cowboys.

Tim Wise, who wrote his article before Dixon’s release pointed out that “Ken and Peri Jones [Dixon’s adoptive parents], for all their love, and for all their "stability" were profoundly unprepared to raise a black male child in this country. Many black parents aren't prepared either - after all, how can one ever be fully ready for all the traps and snares that remain in the path of African Americans even at this late date - but at least they know the drill.”
(http://osdir.com/ml/politics.marxism.analysis/2004-01/msg00011.html)

Marcus Dixon's parents didn't know the drill. They’d never experienced such discrimination. They didn't know that the police were going to take exception to their child. They didn't know that by advising him to tell the truth, without an attorney present, he would ensnare himself. They didn't know that the justice system would conspire to have him imprisoned for as long as possible. They didn’t know about, what Tim Wise calls the “ways of white people”.

Of course, for a white person, to understand the “ways of white people” they have to take a step away from all that they take for granted and realise that minorities don’t just suffer from the presence of discrimination, but also the absence of “white privilege”. White privilege is never having to worry about being stopped by the police for no valid reason. White privilege is not wondering when you move to a new house if the neighbours will snub or even worse, abuse you. White privilege is not having to wonder whether your child is suffering racial discrimination at school, is being isolated because no other children look like them, or being labelled because other children who do look like them have already fallen into the self-fulfilling prophecy set out for them, thereby reinforcing the stereotype that children of that race are not able, not worthy, not willing.

Indeed, theoretically, overt discrimination is being tackled in our society, but equal freedom from discrimination, does not mean equal access to privilege. It struck me that at nearly 25, I am more ignorant about the “ways of white people” than any black or asian child can afford to be and for all my theoretical understanding, I always will be.

So how do any parents, whatever their race, bring up non-white children to be vigilant about discrimination, without carving a chip into their young shoulders? Is it, as Tim Wise states, irresponsible not to teach children about the minefield of racism out there, because minorities cannot afford to not be aware of race? Should Marcus Dixon have been brought up to be cautious about sleeping with white girls, particularly underage white girls with racist fathers? Maybe he should have. I think all young men should be brought up to know better than to sleep with underage girls, irrespective of their race, but for Marcus Dixon, the penalty for doing so was far harsher than it would have been for a white boy.

I think if you were to ask Marcus Dixon, he’d probably agree that his life is better for having been adopted by a white family, than it would have been if he’d been shunted trough the care system. But for all the love and opportunity that his family gave him, to the discriminating world, he is still a black man and his parents’ idealism that his race wasn’t an issue nearly resulted in him being imprisoned for a decade.

Images of Lebanon's Palestinian Refugee Camps

A vision of home; a painting of the British Mandate of Palestine pre-1948 and a young man with a rock. The young man walking in the foreground has never been to the land he calls home, he was born in Lebanon, so were his parents, but he is a Palestinian Refugee and is denied citizenship. Lebanon will never let him work in a professional occupation or own property, the only thing Palestinians in Lebanon can inherit are the memories they construct from the stories they hear about the home they were expelled from 62 years ago.


Fourth Generation Palestinian Refugee, Tripoli Refugee Camp, Lebanon.
I was brought to this "library" to use the only toilet in the camp. It was a hole in the ground, with an outside tap plumbed onto the wall behind a broken door at the back of this shop.


Entrance to a Palestinian familiy home. With overcrowding endemic (Ein El Hilweh camp is around two square kilometres and houses over 70,000 people) it is common for families of 12 to share a single room dwelling.

Children in Shatila Refugee Camp in Lebanon. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, the area within which Shatila and Sabra refugee camps lie was occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). In a deal with the IDF, all of the Palestinian men left the camps, to protect the women and children from the conflict. The IDF allowed Lebanese Christian paramilitaries to enter the camps, in which only women, children and the elderly remained. The refugees were savagely massacred. Women, children, old people, even animals were slaughtered in what was later recognised by the UN as an act of genocide. New inhabitants moved to the camp after the war. Life still goes on there, children play in the rocks and rubble of the buildings destroyed in the fighting. People live among the ghosts, knowing the place where they sleep at night is the site of a massacre of defenceless people.

'Robert Fisk wrote in the UK Independent on January 16, 2010 after a camp visit: “ The Sabra and Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camps are repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums and a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there.” The reason why Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian Refugee camps are the worst of the 58 camps in the Middle East is due primarily to the fact that unlike occupied Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, Palestinians in Lebanon do not possess the most basic civil rights.' (Palestine Civil Rights Campaign)

Children play in the rubble surrounding their home in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon. Too young to remember the civil war, Palestinian children grow up surrounded by destruction, a constant reminder of the massacres their people suffered during the Lebanese civil war from 1975 - 1990.

And somehow, through all the destruction, injustice and want, children will be born and they will laugh and they will play. That is the human spirit and that is why life goes on.

Leah Williams

Leah's blogging

For my first blog, I'm going to copy an article that I wrote for The New Internationalist. It's about an issue that will never cease to pinch at the edges of my consciousness. I think that perhaps it is like that for anyone who has witnessed first hand the tragedies that were once a million pixels trapped in a black box on the news. Like the young people I met in Bosnia that in my memory had been starving children, with bloated bellies and dissapointed eyes, staring down a camera to their annonymous audience, the Palestinians, their plight, the injustice they endure, was all theory to me, until I went to Lebanon.

Right to return

There was a sense of renewed hope when Barack Obama recently attended a meeting of the quartet on the Middle East, comprising the US, Russia, the EU and the UN, to try to move discussions forward and address the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Reports have focused on the negotiations over freezing the expansion of settlements (or the even more innocuous term used in the US: ‘Israeli Neighbourhoods’) and lifting the blockade on Gaza. Then, usually following discussion of the aforementioned issues, the term ‘right to return’ is slipped into news reports, with little explanation of what this ‘right’ – and the denial of it – really means to those involved. I went to Lebanon to talk to Palestinian refugees in camps there, and to learn more about their history and their struggle.

Living as refugees

There are an estimated 14 million Palestinians worldwide. Around 5.5 million live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel; the other 8.5 million are dispersed throughout the world. Half of all the Palestinians in the world are refugees. These 7 million people are at the centre of the right to return issue. Living as refugees, without any citizenship or statehood, these people cling desperately to the hope that they will be granted the right to return to their original homes, which are now in the state of Israel.

Two UN resolutions have been passed, recognizing the Palestinians’ right to return. UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948, stated that those wishing to live at peace with their neighbours should be allowed to return to their homes as quickly as possible. Those choosing not to return home, or those with homes too damaged to return to, should be compensated by the authorities responsible. This right was reiterated in 1974, when in UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 the right to return was described as an ‘inalienable right’. However, 62 years after the first resolution was passed, little remains of the homes the refugees want to return to: their hope of returning is surely dwindling. Historically, Israel’s position on resolving the Palestinian refugee ‘problem’ was that the Palestinians who fled should be resettled in other states. The Palestinians’ position is that they must return, not only because of the principle and the two UN resolutions that stipulate that it is their right, but because existing as refugees is intolerable, both individually and as a people.

Exile and injustice

Nowhere is the sense of exile and injustice felt more than in Lebanon, the tiny country to the north of Israel with a population of only 4 million, from 18 different religious groups. Lebanon is the unhappy host to nearly half a million Palestinian refugees, who do not figure in population statistics because they are not allowed citizenship, or even official residency. The presence of the Palestinians in Lebanon is an added pressure in a country that has enough conflict and division born of its own soil.

The Palestinian refugees live largely in camps dotted around the country. These camps were shoddily constructed to house the mass exodus after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing conflict. Six decades later these camps stand on the same ground, the people living within them third generation refugees. The small crumbling buildings, encased by barbed wire fencing, are home to an ever-growing population without a homeland.

As well as being massively overcrowded (Ein El Hilweh camp is around two square kilometres and houses over 70,000), access to the camps is controlled by often hostile Lebanese troops who confiscate building, educational and medical supplies as they wish. Because of building restrictions, homes are constructed with what can be smuggled in. A family of 12 living in one room is common. The sewage systems, where they exist, have never been renewed and they regularly flood people’s dwellings. Many camps have no running water; where it is available it is rarely clean. Schools are so overcrowded that they have two sessions – one in the morning, another in the afternoon – and still classes of fewer than 50 are unusual. Palestinian flags fly from the dangerously fitted electricity wires and maps of the British Mandate of Palestine, as it existed in the early 1940s, hang from corrugated metal walls.

For the Palestinians in Lebanon the injustice goes beyond the painful past and seeps into an uncertain future, because for generations born in Lebanon there is no promise of life getting any better. In Lebanon, allowing Palestinians to gain citizenship would tip the religious balance further in favour of the Muslims and force the imbalance in political representation, currently in favour of the Christian minority, to be addressed. For this reason they remain refugees. Palestinians are not allowed to gain professional employment; those who manage to get a manual or unskilled job are subjected to unregulated working conditions, are badly paid, forbidden to join unions and are not entitled to employment contracts. For them, qualifications guarantee nothing. With professional unemployment within the camps at around 80 per cent, the prospect of ever escaping the barbed wire-enclosed ghettos is bleak. Even if they did, it is illegal for Palestinians to own property in Lebanon, so they would never have a home to call their own or to leave to their children.

Unworthy of inheritance

The man who organized and facilitated my trip is an inspiring Palestinian, born in a refugee camp, who runs a charity called Palcare, which aims to improve Palestinian-Lebanese relations. He is married to a Lebanese woman and they have an apartment outside the camps in his wife’s name. However, their two children can never inherit the property because their father is a Palestinian, deeming them unworthy of inheritance and ownership rights. They, like their father, are issued refugee papers and are denied any rights as citizens of a state that exists only in history books and in the hearts of its dispossessed people.

Of all the camps, Sabra and Shatila are the saddest examples of the vulnerability of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, the area within which Shatila and Sabra refugee camps lie was occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with Ariel Sharon as the Israeli Defense Minister. The Palestinians claim that the IDF agreed to protect the refugee camps, if all the men (considered to be potential paramilitaries) left, therefore guaranteeing there would be no Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. However, the Israelis permitted the Phalange militia – Lebanese Christian paramilitaries who in 1975 attacked a busload of Palestinian refugees, thus sparking the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war – to enter the camps, in which only women, children and the elderly remained. The refugees were savagely massacred. Women, children, old people, even animals were slaughtered in what was later recognized by the UN as an act of genocide.

Rocks and rubble

New inhabitants moved to the camp after the war. Life still goes on there, children play in the rocks and rubble of the buildings destroyed in the fighting. People live among the ghosts, knowing the place where they sleep at night is the site of a massacre of defenceless people. There is a memorial garden, the site of a mass grave, just outside the camp. The small grass field has three billboards in it, displaying photos of streets littered with bodies of murdered women, naked from the waist down, throats slit, their children lying by their side, lifeless. The Christian Phalangists escaped the majority of international condemnation for the massacre they committed, and Israel bore the brunt of it. The Kahan Commission was established by the Israeli Government to investigate how a massacre by Christian militia could have been carried out in an area under Israeli Defense Force control. It found Ariel Sharon to be personally responsible for ‘ignoring the danger of bloodshed... and not taking measures to prevent bloodshed’ and recommended that he should not hold public office again. Ariel Sharon resigned from his ministerial post, but as we know, went on to become Israeli Prime Minister.

I asked a room full of Palestinian teenagers if they would chose to remain in Lebanon, if they were granted the right to return. Only one girl said she would have to think about it. She’d only ever known Lebanon, she said, she had Lebanese friends, her life was tough, but maybe returning to Israel as a Palestinian would be worse. Everyone else said they would go home, even though they have never been there. ‘We’re not wanted in Lebanon and I don’t blame the Lebanese for that,’ one eloquent young man said. ‘Lebanon was created a divided country, France gave unequal political power to the Christians. They already have their own problems. Civil war could happen at any time, and they would blame us, like they did the last time. We’re not safe here, we have no rights here. In Lebanon we have no future. We must return to Palestine.’

Vision of a homeland

The Palestine they talk of no longer exists. Palestine is now two strips of occupied land, with a population in turmoil and an uncertain future. Where the refugees residing in Lebanon would go if they were given a right to return is unknown. It is unlikely that they will be allowed to return to their ancestral homes, the keys to which they still wear on chains around their necks. The Palestinians hope to create a state, but it is unknown whether it would be able to absorb up to seven million currently stateless people.

The camp wall paintings display a vision of the homeland most have never seen. Desperate to cling to their identity, the refugees have created a false memory of home. They all know the name of their village, they can describe their ancestral house, they have a perfect vision of the life they are being denied and yet they have never stepped foot in the place they call home. One man described to us how he travels into the hills, where he can look over the border to a country that in his lifetime changed from his homeland to the state of Israel. He can see his town, abandoned and forgotten by Israel, of so little value to its new occupiers. For this man, his children and their children, every hope they have hinges upon someday touching a place they have only ever known at a distance.