Posting from Mark:

You haven't heard from me in all this because, well, I really don't have much to say. Just kidding. But most of all I am glad that Ken is doing it, and have LOVED hearing what he winds up saying about this crazy trip. And yes, I know it is crazy but it is a craziness I am stuck with. To whit: I love my people. They are amazing, amazingly complex and completely worthy of love. And completely crazed. Just like the Palestinians. Exactly like the Palestinians, in fact. That was why I picked that cartoon about the Holy Land as an exclusive club to add to the blog a few weeks ago. Let me count some of the ways they are perfectly matched:

Both are extremely verbal and indulgently self-expressive. "Free Zone," an Amos Gitai film we saw at the current Jewish Film Festival ended with a long long long scene of a Jewish woman and a Palestinian woman stuck in a car at the border arguing with each other, gesturing, threatening, competing in the more-aggrieved-than-thou department over $30,000 from the sale of used armored vehicle to clients in Iraq, while an American girl played by Natalie Portman gets out of the car and skips across the border, maybe carrying a bag with the money they are arguing about. Brilliant!

Both are incredibly stubborn, and would much rather lose everything than admit they might be wrong, or at least that the other side might be right.

Both have more than half their people living in diaspora around the world. Palestinian and Jewish families in other countries push their kids to get good educations, become professionals in the medical field or program computers and run IT operations in places like Australia or Saudi Arabia, support each other to start businesses, keep up their ethnic identities while assimilating into French or Canadian or US or Peruvian society, send money to Israel and Palestine, while watching what goes on "back home" in horror.

Both peoples have been on the modern tip and until recently have had relatively few ultra-orthodox fundamentalists in their respective mix. Palestinians, along with Lebanese, were predominantly secular in dress, and have been distrusted and often despised throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, valued only as martyrs. Most black-garbed ultra-orthodox Jews lived in Brooklyn, and until recently many sects denounced the very existence of the secular state of Israel as an abomination, and were a difficult but distinct minority in that state. Unfortunately, as terror in Israel has continued and as any and all hope for statehood has shriveled under the unending occupation of Palestine, religious fundamentalism has increased, and increasingly been used as an excuse first for dehumanizing the enemy, and then for killing as many civilians on the other side as can be reached.

Both are the primary recipients of American military aid. Number one in the world, Israel. Number two, Egypt. The price of peace in an American World has been being a good client of our munitions makers, and even becoming weapons brokers as well. Nobody can accuse the feisty Israeli right wing of being a pawn of the American neo-cons, and in fact the Israeli military's disastrous occupation of Palestine was a role model for our equally quagmirish adventure in Iraq. But if Herren Bush and Cheney cannot directly attack Iran (just imagine if the price of U.S. gas went up to $6!!) they can sit back while Israel bombs the shit out of southern Lebanon. And if Jewish boys and girls can kill lots of Shiites and Muslim soldiers and suicide bombers kill Israeli women and children, we can sit back and watch. Those people over their are all insane anyway, let them all wipe each other out and doesn't the bible say there has to be a war in the holy land before you know who can come back for the End of Days. Bring it on!! OK, excuse me, I can get a little carried away into the dire but dreary realm of hormone-fueled polemics. But you get the idea. The new anti-Semitism is an equal opportunity hater, when we can get two types of Semites to do our dirty work for us. I could go on. And on.

Both know that there will never be peace until there are two countries. But both have become so hurt, heartbroken, and then hardened by the never-ending injustice that each feels at the hands of the other, and so lost in the deaths and dispossessions of the past, that they can barely speak to each other. And they have lost cognizance of one fact, if they ever realized it: that the only real ally for Israel in a middle east increasingly going Islamist is an independent Palestine; and the only real ally for Palestine among the US-backed Sunni kingdoms and shariah-based Shiite states who have used their plight and refused them admission, is Israel.

That eventually this will have to happen, if peace is actually to come, is my hope and prayer. And if I feel mostly all alone in that madness, that sense of alienation in itself should make me feel right at home in the middle east.

But I am just as conflicted about actually being there as is Ken. Just maybe a bit more driven. I wouldn't have wanted to go without him, because I need someone else to see how really amazing the place is, and the peoples are. I want to see holy sites with him, and go to a rave together in the midst of the madness. I want to support him, and I sure know I'll need his support. I usually hate roller coaster, but the worst part is that long slow climb at the start. Here we go.

--Mark Freeman