Apeirogon

Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

When you divide death by life you find a circle.

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there. -Rumi

Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there.” We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it's crazy.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war. What had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mythology of the instincts.

Some people have an interest in keeping the silence. Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear. Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent. And, let’s face it, in Israel we’re very good at fear, it occupies us. Our politicians like to scare us. We like to scare each other. We use the word security to silence others. But it’s not about that, it’s about occupying someone else’s life, someone else’s land, someone else’s head. It’s about control. Which is power. And I realized this with the force of an ax, that it’s true, this notion of speaking truth against power. Power already knows the truth. It tries to hide it. So you have to speak out against power.

Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent.

Without you, she wrote in Hebrew, I am without any depth, I am on the surface here, waiting.

He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.

The thing about the Occupation is that it never let you decide. It took away your ability for choice. Banish it and choice would appear.

It will not be over until we talk

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

We do not talk about peace, we make peace.

In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp’s invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

The days hardened like loaves: he ate them without appetite.

If Abir had not gone, she would not need to be remembered. Her absence, then, was her presence.

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music. 131

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn't encounter people like himself every single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.

Once I thought we could never solve our conflict, we would continue hating each other forever, but it is not written anywhere that we have to go on killing each other. The hero makes a friend of his enemy. That's my duty. Don't thank me for doing it. That's all it is, my duty. When they killed my daughter they killed my fear. I can do anything now.

It’s nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It’s confusing to them.

for a long time they were the same thing to me, justice and revenge.

the Occupation. It was a common enemy. It was destroying both sides. He didn’t hate Jews, he said, he didn’t hate Israel. What he hated was being occupied, the humiliation of it, the strangulation,

Chaos was the fuel of Israel. It was a country built on shifting tectonic plates. Things were constantly colliding. Everything led to the edge, the next moment of rupture, but life became most vivid at moments of danger. It was why people drove so fast and so close. It was why they didn’t wait in lines at the airport. It was why the cafés throbbed in the mornings. It was why the markets were so loud and raw. People were chaotic in unison. Molecular in their turmoil. But it worked. Even the polar opposites were attracted to one another. Occasionally they would bash together and it made the ground pulse. There was left and there was right, and there was Orthodox and secular, and there was Arab and Jew, and there was gay and straight, there was high-tech and hippie, and there was rich and fiercely poor. Israel was a condensed everywhere. A tiny country bursting at the seams, but they were in this together. Every dream and neurosis under the sun. The psychoses. The passivities. The pretensions. The pride. The electricity of it all. And the fear too. Everyone wore a loud armor. Always in search of a debate over who and what and where they were.

one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

Rami said to the audience that all walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naïve, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls. Still, it was his job to insert a crack in the one most visible to him.

So many people considered Rami a traitor, a lackey, a turncoat, but in the end he didn't care: he knew what he was doing, he knew he was getting under their skin, he was peeling it back, exposing the rawness. He was outnumbered, yes, but they would find a tipping point sometime, somewhere, along the way. It was inevitable. He had to keep telling the story. Repeating it again and again and again.