A Liberian refugee wrote InterNation, asking for assistance. I can't even imagine what to tell him...I have a few boxes around me, and half of my home/office rented by another. At the moment I am planning to head to Reno to be with the woman that I love, from Brazil.
  Looks like the mortgage broker across the hall is taking on my office space. He did not acknowledge me as he sat at a table near mine, this morning. I said hello, but only his wife nodded. He glared at her, then, seeing an acquaintance seated at the next table up from me, pointed to my offices. "I'm getting bigger," he said. "Now I'm taking the office on that side."
  I realized that he was not only bragging about his new acquisition, but making a point for me to feel worse than I already do about losing my place here at the Taylor Arcade.
  My vision was to bring in refugees here from various conflicts throughout the world, particularly those who could bring a page each about their own struggle - in their language - to InterNation.   
  Each person would take on an office apiece on the round balcony above the cafe below. Here we would solve the conflicts without violence, even as the Israeli would drink coffee with his nemesis downstairs in the cafe below, before returning to his office above to work on his page. But just as the Middle East Wire had to shut down for lack of support, I realized: Christ, I have to lay my dream to rest. 
  The Middle East Wire - from out of Lebanon - should have stayed around. They, too, were a powerful voice for the Palestinian cause, and I can't believe that not a single rich sheik out there didn't contribute to that cause...but then, how do most sheiks in the Mideast get rich? American oil...
  I have been heartened by many letters of encouragement, and I'm hoping that the InterNation bookstore will take off - help to defray the costs. It has been a lonely job (the lonely Maytag repairman of the Internet sort of thing), living in my office at my little strip here beneath the jaundiced eye of the local merchants.
  "What?" the old, big beaked lady asked me from her store below, "You can't just give me your paintings, or whatever you have for a few dollars, now that you're leaving?" What? The lady actually spoke to me? For the last year she has told everyone I have cams in the women's room.
  Whooah. Capitalism really brings us all together, doesn't it?
  Earlier I wrote about the restaurant owner below my balcony, Nick, who made it his purpose in life to give me hell, saying as he placed his fist beneath my chin, "I can come into your place anytime I want to." I believed he wanted me out. But I was wrong. He needed me here to feel that he could show who is in charge, that sort of thing.
  I resisted. There were fights, the troops were called in (the PD), and by the time I decided to leave he told people he had made the peace with me. His torch was soon carried by others in his tribe who felt an equal need to invade my small strip on the balcony.
  Again, my analogy suffers in comparison to the REAL indignities the Palestinian people must live through each day. I have heard many say that given the chance, Israel would remove the entire Palestinian population from the territories for the sake of the "greater Israel" dream. Just make a big parking lot out of it with a Holocaust museum in the center. Another token reminder as to the sort of 'victims' the Jewish people are.
  To the contrary, Lukid has an investment in the territories, particularly in the West Bank. Their gain it all? The pure satisfaction of grinding another people down if only to show them who is in charge, that Abraham is THEIR patriarch, not anyone else's. More than this, the Jews, like all conquerors upon laying waste to another culture, daily prod the Palestinians to see what their limits are, like the need of an interrogator to find himself, his humanity, through torturing the enemy.
  Not long ago, Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezerted, interviewed a number of suicide bombers who failed. The bombers, he speculated, say to themselves, "I die, therefore I exist. They think a heroic death will give meaning to their existence." But his 'findings' say far more about the Jewish psyche.  
  Israel has now come to exist as a state, but guess what? The state is no longer based on anything more meaningful than its daily suppression of Palestinians. Therefore, the Israeli's need to show the Palestinians who is in charge - and placing them in a situation where they are bound to retaliate - speaks reams about their own will for self-destruction; the Jewish need to be victimized in order to authenticate their own existence.  
  What a paradox! The aggressor as victim.
  The people in my building did whatever they could think of in order to see that I would retaliate. Despite the constant insult, the destruction of my equipment, etc., I continue to administer my territory as if it were mine, as if their constant invasion of my privacy did not matter. And I have often wondered, What if the Palestinians, instead of retaliating, had simply ignored the invading forces and continued to establish their state right in the midst of the Occupation? By choosing to retaliate for Sharon's visit to the Mount, the Palestinians played right into his hands!
  Okay, so this is different. I do not get stuck at checkpoints, daily humiliated at the butt of a gun - still somehow I cannot help but think if only the Palestinians had ignored the power plays of the enemy, the Israeli's would have backed off.   
  As my office went up for rent (on the same day of the first bombing in Gaza!) I returned to find somebody had come into my office and destroyed my PC's. I found backup disks, and by the time I rebuilt my equipment the FOR RENT sign had gone up in my window. 
  It turns out that the mortgage broker, Jack, is involved in the messianic Jewish movement. Isn't that a strange coincidence? The office of InterNation is about to be taken on by a guy who sides not only with Israel, but propounds the view that Jesus Christ cannot return unless the Jews - according to prophesy - rout the Arab world as a part of God's plan for Armageddon. The attitude of these people? The more Arabs that are killed, the sooner the Prince of Peace will return.
  Figure that one.
  I asked Jack why he needs my place. "Because I can take it," he replied.
  Israel, like the mortgage broker, is involved in a greedy land grab for empire. The other day, I listened as Jack entertained several people. He spoke for an hour about his $500 bottle of wine and a meal he recently spent over 2 grand for. Interestingly, he never mentioned how the wine tasted, nor did he describe the food. In the same vein, he talked about his properties as if they have no value aside from his using them to advance himself. Individually, we call this behavior egotism, and in the politic among nations? Imperialism.  
  The loosely organized shops throughout the Taylor Arcade are like the nation states of the West. The historian, Arnold Toynbee, wrote that 'outsiders' are confronted with either "whole-hearted Westernization or outright extinction." And while many think the Jewish occupation is about religion, it is just as much about a bunch of Europeans and Americans colonizing the Palestinian territories.  
  Now it is time for the merchants to finish colonizing the Arcade - and see that I am tossed out, along with my outlandish books and symbols of a culture they simply cannot comprehend.
   Early on in the present Intifada, Tal, an Israeli, wrote me saying he felt the crisis created a leverage of power for his leaders. "The benefit of their sending young men off to go after Palestinians? It keeps them driving their expensive Volvo's and eating nice, fig dinners."
   What is more, now the Israeli imperialists can can point at all their new settlements, and say, "Look, see how big I am now?"
  Until the day before the siege was lifted around Arafat, the mortgage broker tried to pull a fast one and told the landlord - despite the fact I continued to pay my rent - that he would take on my last, remaining room. "We'll let him sit in the corner by the wall," he said. 
  I fought this. I could but imagine spending my days here, listening to the money lender blather on non-stop abut his $500 bottles of wine, or $2,000 dinners. I won a temporary stay. The landlord, a generally peaceable man, brokered a peace. The siege was lifted, and so it was of little surprise when I heard that on the following day, the siege had been lifted against Arafat, as well! 
  Okay (I repeat) this is not Gaza Strip, nor the West Bank. But the point is, whether here or there, the same premise is at work - the reality of empire is the same. When I leave here, what will happen then? Will all of Gaza be invaded? Unlikely! And for me? I am no victim. I will walk away and shake the dust off of my shoes.