address: palestine (where you can’t get mail…yet)

wow.  you’re still here?  you didn’t totally give up on ever hearing from me again via such new fangled communication tactics like blogs?

(in brief) i have been traveling in the middle east for 2 months with my family and then Interfaith Peace-Builders.  i have moved to Ramallah, Palestine where i am looking for a job and intend to soon begin Arabic classes at Birzeit University.  i hope to be in the ramallah area through july 2010 at least. 

(out of brief) a friend asked me my address the other day and i was trying to explain that there was no way i could receive mail in Palestine.  it was one of those: “you know you’re in a military occupation when” moments. 

but that led me to this discovery: Palestine was finally granted permission from the powers that be to control their own mail independent of Israel!  just last month the Universal Postal Union agreed to allocate Palestine an internationally-recognized postal processing code. 

this will take awhile to get underway so i will not be able to receive any christmas cards. 

and i definitely can’t receive packages from abroad in the west bank.  i don’t know that anyone has ever tried. 

these issues were supposed to be worked out during the Oslo Accords (1993–when Arafat and Rabin had their famous handshake in front of a glowing Bill Clinton on the White House lawn).  the Oslo Accords provided for the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and one of the functions the PA would have control over was delivering mail.  but only *within* the West Bank and Gaza.  Oslo promised an end to the occupation and a final status agreement on borders, refugees, and Jerusalem in 5 years and instead they got to deliver mail internally.

anything from Arab countries abroad was routed through Egypt and anything from the rest of the world was routed through Israel.   Israel would inspect the mail and frequently confiscate packages and other materials bound for the West Bank or Gaza. 

and if you have any hope of those materials reaching the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory) you better make sure they say “care of Israel” or “via Israel” rather than mentioning Palestine. 

and don’t even think of mailing something to Gaza.  some students at Georgia Tech performed an experiment last year to see how long it took to get packages to some of the world’s hardest to reach places.  they had better luck using courier services to send packages to Kazakstan and Sudan then they did to Gaza.  Israeli customs would not allow in to Gaza baby ruth chocolate bars. 

for security reasons of course. 

of course there are lots of places in the world where mail is inaccessible–but precious few that have been denied this right by an another country.  and this entire situation could be fixed with a single political decision that so many of us have a say in.

now substitute “mail is inaccesssible” for “people are forced to eat grass seed” or “people are prevented from going to school” and a billion other tragedies to get an idea about how this is a, well, special kind of place.

that easy political decision (i.e. get the heavy boot off the Palestinian postal system) didn’t happen but Palestine managed to fanagle its own way towards international recognition. 

there’s more and more talk around here about doing this on a UN resolution scale that would simply go ahead and recognize Palestine as a sovereign country and a member of the United Nations. 

i’ve heard about it from meetings i had the honor to attend with Palestinian parliamentarians, a member of the PLO executive committee, and even the prime minister (Salam Fayyad) himself.

but more politics later…for now i just want to let you all know that i have a new address: palestine!