The current wave of criminalization of thought and expression on behalf of a genocide made me recollect the greatest WTF moment I had in all these months. It was last November in Oakland. I was visiting a friend of a friend who lived in one the poshest in Alameda, which is separate from Oakland municipally, but connected in any other way. I was craving Mexican food so I looked on Google Maps for a nearby recommended spot. I found one about 2.5 kilometers (or so) from the address I was visiting, so I decided to walk there (walking is my absolute favorite activity in new places: this is the way to be immersed in a place). The friend of a friend was visibly surprised when I told him where I was going to get Mexican food; I asked why and he said it was a very non-white part of Oakland. Being not very white in appearance myself, I didn't particularly mind. If you grew up almost anywhere else than the US, you have no idea how racialized and segregated the landscape is. So I started walking, and after about 10 minutes the surroundings began to change dramatically. Posh expensive homes, nice paved roads and sidewalks, and expensive cars quickly gave way to graffiti, broken asphalt, and old pickup trucks. But I persisted, though the scene became visibly less and less friendly and welcoming. When I was some hundred meters from the Mexican food spot, things looked so broken and alien, with abandoned cars and barred-down stores I started feeling a little uneasy. But I had to see that place, and I was so hungry. I couldn't find the entrance to the restaurant at first: it was almost hidden. You had to go to the next plot, a carwash if I remember correctly, and then go in from the side. Walking in, it was really it was like stepping into Mexico. No one spoke English. I was addressed in Spanish, and as far as I could tell, I was the only non-Mexican customer present. I kind of liked that. I was clearly in the midst of simple people, poor working class (workers from the nearby carwash were having lunch), and just poor. - As I had been a couple of weeks in Oakland already, and met some lovely people there but also saw some of its homelessness, substance abuse, and poverty, it was a moment of me trying to make sense of what I was seeing and experiencing. The segregation in class and race divisions in America took me by surprise. I had never seen such wealth and such destitution brushing against each other but never mingling, as I have seen in Oakland (and San Francisco). I was a war refugee, basically, getting to grips with the unthinkable gap between what the US was spending on war in the Middle East and the way the poor people and poor neighborhoods and streets in America look like. I had never seen such gaps, or such extreme poverty in Israel. I had never seen people living under bridges in tents and abandoned caravans that smelled so terrible of burning substances I could feel the taste of it in my throat. I walked under there, too, and it was sadder than I can describe. And as I was sitting in that Mexican restaurant, I raised my head from my food and saw this sign right across from me. - I was among people who could hardly afford living at all, many of whom didn't speak English. Their streets and neighborhoods were broken and downright scary (how abandoned they must feel, in that country of unimaginable wealth). And right there, in front of their faces, someone had enough money and delusion to plant that sign, warning them of Hamas. At that moment, after overcoming the initial daze and disbelief, so many things connected for me, it felt like a personal epiphany.
@alon_mizrahi “I had never seen such wealth and such destitution brushing against each other but never mingling” ㅤ You should return to Isra-hell one day and take a walk from Pisgat Ze’ev, down a small wadi, and up to Shu’fat Refugee Camp.
@alon_mizrahi These kinds of neighborhoods are recruiting grounds for the military.
@alon_mizrahi I grew up in an area like that: Grosse Pointe (rich, white, highly policed) borders on Detroit (poor, Black/Brown, one of the highest crime rates in the US). Black maids getting stopped daily by cops as they go to work in GP. It's "Free Market Capitalism" + Racism + Cop City.
@alon_mizrahi Walking in a North American city??? You really aren't from around here, are you? :)
@alon_mizrahi Despite the poverty you experienced the USA gives billions to Israel in monetary aid and arms to commit genocide, to protect illegal settlements, subsidised healthcare, to pay Israelis to read the Torah all day and many other things.
@alon_mizrahi More to the point