MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Cuba vs Covid-19 & Greed

On 23 March 2021, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a group of Conservative Party backbenchers: ‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends.’ Johnson was articulating the dogma that the pursuit of private profit through capitalist free markets leads to efficient outcomes. In reality, however, Britain’s accomplishments in developing the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and in the national vaccination rollout have more to do with state investments than the market mechanism. Government money subsidised the vaccine development at the University of Oxford, and it is the state-funded National Health Service that has carried out the vaccination programme. Johnson did not admit that it is due to capitalism and greed that Britain now has the fifth worst Covid-19 mortality rate in the world with over 126,500 deaths (almost 1,857 per million people in the population) and counting.

The British government, like most neoliberal regimes, refused to take the measures necessary to slow and halt community transmission, it failed early on to provide health care and social care workers with adequate PPE and other resources which could have saved the lives of hundreds of frontline staff who died as a result. It contracted private businesses to carry out essential activities, most with little or no relevant experience, for example, instead of equipping the community-based GP system of the National Health Service to take charge of ‘track and trace’, the government dished out £37 billion to Serco to manage part of the system. In public health terms it has been disastrous; but measured by Boris Johnson’s celebrated standards of capitalism and greed it is has indeed excelled. The greatest beneficiaries of Britain’s response to the pandemic have been the private corporations making huge profits. Around 2,500 Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey consultants are on an average daily rate of £1,000, with some paid £6,624 a day.

Johnson has now laid out a road map for reopening the economy. As a result, even the most optimistic scenario predicts a third wave between September 2021 and January 2022 resulting in at least 30,000 additional deaths in Britain. These deaths are preventable. But it precisely because the British government is driven by the capitalism and greed that it insists that we have to learn to ‘live with the virus’ so that the business of business can continue.

Contrary to Johnson’s claims, this pandemic has affirmed that public healthcare needs cannot be adequately met under a profit-based system. Indeed, it is the absence of the capitalist profit motive which underlies the outstanding domestic and international response to Covid-19 by socialist Cuba, which now has five vaccines in clinical trials and is set to be among the first nations to vaccinate its entire population.

By reacting quickly and decisively, by mobilising its public healthcare system and world-leading biotech sector, Cuba has kept contagion and fatalities low. In 2020 Cuba confirmed a total of 12,225 coronavirus cases and 146 deaths in a population of 11.2 million, among the lowest rates in the Western Hemisphere. In November 2020, the airports were opened, leading to a surge with more infections in January 2021 than the whole of the previous year. By 24 March 2021, Cuba had registered fewer than 70,000 cases and 408 deaths. The death rate was 35 per million and the fatality rate was just 0.59% (2.2% worldwide; 2.9% in Britain). Within one year, 57 brigades of medical specialists from Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Contingent had treated 1.26 million Covid-19 patients in 40 countries; they joined 28,000 Cuban healthcare professionals already working in 66 countries. Cuba’s accomplishments are more extraordinary given that from 2017 onwards, the Trump administration punitively unleashed 240 new sanctions, actions and measures to tighten the 60-year blockade of Cuba, including nearly 50 additional measures during the pandemic which cost the health sector alone over $200 million.

Cuba has gone on the offensive against Covid-19, mobilising the prevention-focussed, community based public healthcare system to carry out daily house visits to actively detect and treat cases and channelling the medical science sector to adapt and produce new treatments for patients and Covid-19 specific vaccines. These advances bring hope not just for Cuba, but for the world.

Some 200 Covid vaccines are being developed worldwide; by 25 March 2021, 23 candidates had advanced to phase III clinical trials. Two of those were Cuban (Soberana 2 and Abdala). No other Latin American country has developed its own vaccine at this stage. Cuba has three more vaccine candidates in earlier stage trials (Soberana 1, Soberana Plus and an intranasal, needle-free vaccine called Mambisa). How do we explain this accomplishment? Cuba’s biotech sector is unique; entirely state-funded and owned, free from private interests, profits are not sought domestically, and innovation is channelled to meet public health needs. Dozens of research and development institutions collaborate, sharing resources and knowledge, instead of competing, which facilitates a fast track from research and innovation to trials and application. Cuba has the capacity to produce 60-70% of the medicines it consumes domestically, an imperative due to the US blockade and the cost of medicines in the international market. There is also fluidity between universities, research centres, and the public health system. These elements have proven vital in the development of Cuba’s Covid-19 vaccines.

As we know, there are five types of Covid-19 vaccines being developed globally:

. Viral vector vaccines, which inject an unrelated harmless virus modified to deliver SARS-CoV-2 genetic material (Oxford AstraZeneca, Gamaleya and SputnikV);

. Genetic vaccines containing a segment of SARS-CoV-2 virus genetic material (Pfizer, Moderna);

. Inactivated vaccines containing disactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus (Sinovac,/Butantan, SinoPharm, Bharat Biotec);

. Attenuated vaccines containing weakened SARS-CoV-2 virus (Codagenix);

. Protein vaccines containing proteins from the virus which trigger an immune response (Novavax, Sanofi/GSK).

The five Cuban vaccines under clinical trials are all protein vaccines; they carry the portion of the virus spike protein which binds to human cells; it generates neutralising antibodies to block the binding process. Dr Marlene Ramirez Gonzalez explains that they are, ‘subunit vaccines, one of the most economical approaches and the type for which Cuba has the greatest know-how and infrastructure. From protein S – the antigen or part of the SARS-CoV2 virus that all Covid vaccines target because it induces the strongest immune response in humans – Cuban candidates are based only on the part that is involved in contact with the cell’s receptor: the RBD (receptor-binding domain) which is also the one that induces the greatest amount of neutralizing antibodies. This strategy is not exclusive to Cuban vaccines. But Soberana 02 does distinguish itself from the rest of the world’s candidates as the only “conjugate vaccine”. Currently in phase III clinical trials, it combines RBD with tetanus toxoid, which enhances the immune response…Cuba had already developed another vaccine with this principle. It is Quimi-Hib, “the first of its kind to be approved in Latin America and the second in the world”, against Haemophilus influenzae type b, coccobacilli responsible for diseases such as meningitis, pneumonia and epiglottitis.’

Idania Caballero, a pharmaceutical scientist at BioCubaFarma points out that the vaccines build on decades of medical science and work on infectious diseases. ‘The mortality rate in Cuba due to infectious diseases, even in times of Covid, is less than 1%. Cuba today vaccinates against 13 diseases with 11 vaccines, eight of which are produced in Cuba. Six diseases have been eliminated as a result of vaccination schedules. The vaccines produced with these technologies have been administered even to children in the first months of life.’

The Soberana vaccines are produced by the Finlay Institute in partnership with the Centre for Molecular Immunology (CIM) and the Centre of Biopreparados. Soberana means ‘sovereign’, reflecting its economic and political importance; without a domestic product, Cuba would struggle to access foreign vaccines either due to the US blockade or to the cost. Soberana vaccines insert genetic information into superior mammalian cells. Soberana Plus is a the world’s first vaccine for Covid-19 convalescent patients to reach clinical trials.

The other vaccines, Abdala and Mambisa, names which also pay tribute to Cuba’s struggle for independence, are produced by the Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB). These vaccines insert genetic information in a less evolved organism, a unicellular microorganism (the yeast Pichia Pastoris). They build on the CIGB’s extraordinary record, including its Hepatitis B vaccines, used in Cuba for 25 years.

By developing different vaccine platforms, those institutions avoid competing for resources. Caballero explains that: ‘Cuba has the capacity to produce two independent vaccine chains, with over 90 million vaccines annually, while maintaining the required production of other products for the domestic market and for export.’ The Cuban vaccines require three doses and, because they are stable at temperatures of between 2 and 8 degrees, do not require costly special refrigeration equipment.

By late March, phase III trials were underway for Soberana 2 and Abdala, each incorporating over 44,000 volunteers over 19 years old in regions with high incidence of Covid-19. Soberana 2 is being administered in Havana and Abdala in Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo. Analysis and follow-up for phase III trial patients will continue until January 2022 to investigate whether they prevent transmission, how long immunity lasts, and other questions that no vaccine producers can yet answer. However, an additional 150,000 healthcare workers in Havana are receiving Soberana 2 shots, as part of an ‘interventional study’, a form of clinical trial that can be authorised after drug safety has been demonstrated in phase II. Intervention studies do not involve double blind testing or placebos. Another 120,000 healthcare workers in western Cuba will receive Abdala in the next few weeks. Other interventional studies in the capital will see 1.7 million people in Havana, most of the adult population, vaccinated by the end of May 2021, meaning that 2 million Cubans will have been fully vaccinated.

Assuming satisfactory results, in June the real national vaccination campaign will begin, prioritising groups according to risk factors and starting with over 60-year-olds. By the end of August 2021, six million Cubans, over half the population, will have been covered and by the end of the year, Cuba will be among the world’s first countries to fully vaccinate its entire population.

Cuban medical scientists are confident that they have the capacity and experience to adapt their vaccine formulations, technologies and action protocols to tackle new variants. The next steps are for Soberana 1 and Soberana Plus to enter phase II trials and a new study involving 5 to 18 year olds will be launched.

Cuba’s CIGB have teamed up with colleagues in China to work on a new vaccine called Pan-Corona, designed to be effective on different strains of the coronavirus. It will use parts of the virus that are conserved, not exposed to variation, to generate antibodies, combined with parts directed at cellular responses. The Cubans contribute the experience and personnel, while the Chinese provide equipment and resources. The research will take place at the Yongzhou Joint Biotechnology Innovation Center, in China’s Hunan Province, which was established last year with equipment and laboratories designed by Cuban specialists. Gerardo Guillen, director of biomedical science at CIGB said the approach: ‘could protect against epidemiological emergencies of new strains of coronavirus that may exist in the future’. The project builds on nearly two decades of medical science collaboration between Cuba and China, including five joint ventures in the biotech sector.

Cuban professionals have received ten gold medals from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) over 26 years; their biotech products were exported to 49 countries prior to the pandemic, including vaccines used in childhood immunisation programmes in Latin America. Cuba has stated that its Covid-19 vaccines will be exported to other countries. This brings hope to low- and middle-income nations that simply cannot afford to vaccinate their populations at high prices (between $10 and $30 per dose) demanded by big pharma. In February 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that US company Pfizer has been ‘bullying’ Latin American countries into putting up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as guarantees against the cost of any future legal cases in relation to their Covid-19 vaccines.

Through an agreement with Iran’s Pasteur Institute, 100,000 Iranians will take part in the phase III clinical trials for Soberana 2 and another 60,000 people will participate in Venezuela. Other countries including Mexico, Jamaica, Vietnam, Pakistan, and India, have stated their interest in receiving the Cuban vaccines, as has the African Union, which represents all 55 nations in Africa. It is likely that Cuba will apply a sliding scale to its Covid-19 vaccine exports, as it does with the export of medical professionals, so what it charges reflects the countries’ ability to pay.

What Cuba has achieved is remarkable, but as Caballero states: ‘without the unjust US blockade, Cuba could have more and better results’. Cuba has become a world-leader in biotechnology because it has a socialist state with a centrally planned economy, that has invested in science and technology and puts human welfare before profit; that is, with the absence of capitalism and greed that British Prime Minister Johnson celebrates.

On the anniversary of the United Kingdom’s first lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic, as candles were lit in doorways and the country mourned 125,000 deaths, as I mentioned above, the prime minister was in the mood for gloating.

“The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends,” Boris Johnson reportedly told Conservative MPs, before pleading “forget I said that”.

The timing of the comments was distasteful in the extreme as countries across the world are struggling to find any vaccines, while Britain has acquired several times the doses it needs by bypassing the international bodies meant to ensure a fair global allocation. But more worrying was the warped understanding revealed by the remark of what is actually behind Britain’s successful vaccine rollout.

Johnson claimed the vaccine breakthrough was brought about by “giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders”. But nothing could be further from the truth. The British government, like other governments, invested heavy public funds into the research and development of vaccines, assuming most of the risk in the process.

The AstraZeneca jab was actually developed by scientists from the University of Oxford, a publicly-funded institution, working with scientists from a range of backgrounds, including many educated in state schools. Those scientists had initially wanted to make their vaccine patent-free, before AstraZeneca entered the scene, effectively privatising the research.

The vaccines have been brought to market thanks to tens of thousands of trial volunteers who risked their health by putting themselves forward, not out of greed, but out of a desire to end this pandemic and help their families and communities. And the rollout is being managed by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), a world-class public healthcare system that, despite market-driven reforms in recent years, exists entirely outside the logic of the market.

Greed, however, drove Big Pharma companies to privatise vaccines developed with public resources, and patent lifesaving medicines, in an effort to keep a grip on their monopolies. As a result, pharmaceutical giants sold these jabs almost exclusively to rich countries, allowing the UK to secure enough doses to vaccinate its population three times over.

Even the European Union is struggling to secure doses, and is now engaged in a bitter war of words with Britain. This is because Johnson’s “me-first” approach, combined with the secret contracts which are a consistent feature of Big Pharma-owned drugs, has fuelled anger and suspicion. Much worse, many low- and middle-income countries will have to wait until at least 2023 to vaccinate a large enough percentage of their populations to achieve herd immunity.

And what has stopped the global south countries from making their own vaccines, and instead forced them to wait for the pharmaceutical giants to decide it is their turn? Greed again. The UK, US, and the EU – home to the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies – have blocked attempts led by India and South Africa to temporarily waive patents on COVID-19 vaccines. A waiver would, they claimed, hurt “incentives” – or profits, in plain English.

All this is a perfect example of Johnson’s economic strategy – transferring massive public resources into the hands of large corporations and then tasking them with carrying out vitally important services for the public. Increasingly these contracts seem to be awarded on the basis of closeness to the Conservative Party. Transparency is an afterthought at best, and while these companies do indeed seem to excel at transferring value to their shareholders, they are much less competent at delivering public services. The multibillion-pound disaster that is Britain’s test and trace system is just one leading example of this.

When it comes to vaccines, the consequences of this strategy are clear for all to see. If all of the vaccines due to be delivered in 2021 were distributed equitably, we could vaccinate 70 percent of the world this year, effectively ending the pandemic. Greed is preventing it. The incompetence of AstraZeneca’s rollout is now helping fuel vaccine scepticism across the world. And the secrecy of its contracts is fostering a dangerous vaccine war between the EU and the UK.

AstraZeneca is not the only greedy company in the vaccine race. Many other corporations have also happily taken public resources, sold virtually their entire stock to rich countries, and are now looking forward to securing sky-high profit margins. Pfizer is on target to make more than $4bn clear profit this year, and Moderna’s executives are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars based on the company’s rocketing share price.

Johnson is rapidly emerging as the most vocal proponent of this form of capitalism – an economic model characterised by monopoly power, cronyism and the transfer of huge resources from the public sector, the environment, and working people into the private wealth of the global elite.

The immediate consequence of this is the prolonging of the pandemic, as coronavirus is allowed to run rampant in poorer countries, taking countless lives that could have been saved. But the longer-term consequences will be even more catastrophic: unprecedented levels of inequality, runaway climate change and the erosion of trust in democratic institutions.

Greed is not what has led to the UK’s successful vaccine rollout. Instead, it risks derailing efforts to end this crisis. Those of us who want to make sure the world is not only safe from COVID-19, but from the crises of poverty, inequality and climate change, rather than celebrating greed, need to work out how to restrain it as quickly as possible.

PALESTINA

The fall of Jerusalem to the First Crusade in 1099 stunned the world of Islam, which was at the peak of its achievements. Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad were large cities with combined population of over two million—advanced urban civilisation at a time when the citizens of London and Paris numbered less than fifty thousand in each case. The Caliph in Baghdad was shaken by the ease with which the barbarian tide had overwhelmed the armies of Islam. It was to be a long occupation. – Tariq Ali, The Book of Saladin

Applied Empathy (i.e., caring) regarding events in the Middle East has taken a beating over the decades. Fatigue has set in and we don’t really care anymore — an indifference has been exposed that is up there with Climate Change for imminent demise. Maybe they are linked. Maybe the real pandemic underway is mental. Some kind of fight-flight-freeze intuiting of catastrophic danger ahead for us all as we hurdle toward the Singularity.

This fatigue point has been reached incrementally over the years since the end of WWII, which ended with the Big Bang of our unnecessarily nuking the Japs to spite the Russkies. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer quietly noted.Gods of Death, as Freud, and others, figured we’d end up as. After WWI, newly discovered Middle East oil became the most prevalent source of world energy, leading to “skirmishes” for its wealth, after the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. And the other major transformative event for the region was the Jewish demand, after WWII and the Holocaust, for a homeland — based upon historical precedence.

The world has been delighted to watch the wilderness religions — Christians, Islam and Judaism — duke it out for millennia, like three irascible siblings each intent on domination. The Three Abes (they all derive from Abraham) have, individually or together, shaped the way the world has progressed economically, spiritually, militarily, and morally for at least 1000 years, going back to the Crusades. So, though we are fatigued with the whole lot of them, the Three Abes still hold our attention, and what happens in the Middle East today still has far-reaching consequences for our collective future. Arab oil, especially plastics and carbon emissions, has filthified the world, maybe beyond rescue. Tensions between Israel and its neighbors, especially Iran and Syria, threaten to act as a catalyst for apocalyptic destruction. In this still developing regional denouement with global consequences, the human rights violations in Palestine / Israel, that we hear about almost every day, just don’t move us; we no longer expect much to change.

The Book of Ramallah, a collection of 10 short stories from the West Bank city, attempts to stir our interest again. The book, part of the Comma Press (UK) ‘Reading the City’ series, focuses on human stories that emphasize people and their environs over a strictly political posturing. Part of the deadening of our response to the so-called Israeli-Palestinian Question, over the years, has been the MSM filtering of events there as “political” rather than human. Always we talk about the “two-state solution,” even when there is no hope of that now. We don’t talk about America’s role in the demise of that “Solution.”

But what is Ramallah? I pictured a dust town of cinder block barrios, because destruction and cheap construction seem to be the only images we are provided by the MSM in the telling of the region’s story. But it’s a modest modern city worth getting a true picture about before reading the stories. A quick glimpse is provided by LivingBobby at YouTube. Palestinians are not dust monkeys, as is suggested by some MSM accounts, but vibrant and as materialistic as the rest of us. They’ve tasted of the sugar, and want more. Israel says to them, you can have more sugar, but first…. kow-tow.

But, as Maya Abu Al-Hayat, reminds us in the introduction to The Book of Ramallah, ancient frictions act as a frisson to affairs there:A place of tension as well as excitement, with its many tower blocks and mosques, churches and bars, and where gunfire can always be heard in the distance, resounding to a backdrop of curfews, arrests, sieges, strikes and martyrs.

It’s a quiet book, but there’s tomfoolery going on in the background that brings disquiet.

The first thing that struck me about the stories is their relative narrative simplicity; there are few lyrical flourishes to amaze, although there are certainly plenty of spirited flashes of imagination, inclusions on the whole are stoical — we are dealing with ordinary people, with limited material wealth and dealing with the everyday stress of the Israeli occupation of their homeland, and this subjugation comes across in their often subdued utterances.

In the opening story, “Love in Ramallah,” a bus and several cars are held at the Uyoun al-Haramiya checkpoint, and the passengers are forced to get out of their vehicles. While they wait for the slow and deliberate wheels of bureaucracy to move them through, an Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldier decides to have some sadistic fun. He tells the passengers that nobody gets through the checkpoint until a young Palestinian boy kisses a young girl, a violation of cultural norms:In front of the checkpoint, the soldiers were giggling to themselves. Rummaging for change in their pockets and passing it around, they began placing bets on whether he would kiss her or not.

Amusement and humiliation. Fascist delight and schadenfreude. All that’s missing is a bitter lemonade stand.

When Na’eem, the boy, refuses, the IDF soldier beats him — the rifle butt struck his thigh. Everyone heard the thud on his femur before he fell to the ground, only for the soldier’s jackboot to follow up….

To prevent further bloodshed, the young runs to the boy and tells him to kiss her; he does, and the ordeal is almost over. They are free now to cross the checkpoint, but on the bus, the passengers’ eyes reflected a mixture of shame, oppression, anger and disapproval. They stared brokenly at the floor; silence was the new passenger they had taken on.

This simple, editorially well-placed story sets the tone for the reader’s expectations. And when the authors depict a lifestyle of multiple checkpoints per day.

In the ironically titled, “A Tragic Ending,” Mahmoud Shukair titillates the reader with the tale of Hatem, a man in search of women. A kind of subplot sees his friend Muawiya, a local wannabe politician who goes around “loudly pontificating about ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’ so everyone could hear.” Dramatic tension is built in his suspicion that he’s being tailed by an “informant,” a possibility he might find useful as he runs for local office. We get pictures of Hatem’s hirsute neighbor girl who frequently comes on to him, lifting her dress to reveal her hairy legs. “He had never taken a liking to her, even though she was so kind-hearted that it verged on stupidity.”

Instead, he longs for Randa, who he has peeped on without drawing her attention, and realizes his love for her will be unrequited when she moves to America after marrying her cousin. Aziza is a married woman with a surplus of sensual commodities with whom Hatem carries on an affair, until she is almost caught red-honeyed by her husband; Hatem climbs out a window and hears screams of torture coming from the honey pot. He moves to the city. He ends up with the hairy woman. Shukair’s tale is a clever and comical suggestion of the idleness (and boredom) of men in Ramallah — they’re either getting laid or running for office. (In America, it often amounts to the same thing.) Shukair seems uninterested in promoting any seriousness regarding politics — Palestinians have no power, and Muawiya is no resistance fighter. But the subtle humor suggests Boccaccio or 1001 Nights.

But there is no humor in the Occupation of the West Bank and the ‘lifestyle’ it imposes on Palestinians. The swisscheesification of the West Bank has led to communities separated by private Israel roads with checkpoints everywhere, a situation making a two-state solution almost impossible. The Oslo Accords, on paper, provided more autonomy and self-rule to Palestinians, such ‘progress’ is subverted by the infrastructure that connects Israeli settlements. As Al-Hayat notes in the introduction, (Although Ramallah was designated an ‘Area A’, in the Oslo II Accord, meaning it had full civil and security control, and was out of bounds for Israelis, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) still dominate the network of roads surrounding it, many of which are bypasses that only Israeli citizens can use, servicing the many expropriated land settlements that have sprung up throughout the West Bank in the years since Oslo).

It is hard to grasp the accommodation required to make this situation palatable or even practical from the point-of-view of centralized governance.

The absurdity of this situation is brought out wonderfully in “At the Qalandiya Checkpoint,” by Ameer Hamad. The reader is introduced to an irascible narrator who was born at a checkpoint, his father running in his underwear from Jerusalem to Nablus to get there for the birth. The father nicknames his son Salah al-Din, after the legendary anti-Crusader who defended the Holy Land from invaders. Salah al-Din grumbles and grouses about all the time he and others have spent at checkpoints. He tells us about checkpoints in other countries, their relative humanity: There they will try to force you to read, study, listen to music or do yoga for hours on end; someone has even opened a pop-up café called ‘Love at the Checkpoint’.

But for al-Din and his compatriots, anthropologists reckon they’ve lost years waiting at checkpoints.

Hamad reflects on time, one of the things people do while waiting, and trots in Samuel Beckett for a cameo tap dance about time: To be fair, this checkpoint has its advantages, most notably the fact that waiting here makes you experience time in its purest form. As Samuel Beckett famously observed, it doesn’t get purer than this. Indeed, to quote Ronan McDonald in his Cambridge Introduction, Chapter 3, page 67, second sentence: ‘Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in the hours he spent at the Qalandiya checkpoint between 1948 and 1949 while he was teaching Absurdist Literature at Birzeit University.’

The Palestinians, too, are waiting absurdly for their Homeland to arrive and pass time aimlessly. For Salah al-Din days at the checkpoints have become theatre, full of dramatic tensions. He let’s a woman cut in line, only to see that line close a minute later. He observes “jetsetters” given priority processing.

Al-Din enters into a revealing dialogue with a checkpoint guard, a Russian Jew emigre, who takes a liking to al-Din’s wit, but who is an unshakeable bureaucrat. Al-Din refuses to tell the guard about his past but is invited to project the future: ‘I am the one who will free Jerusalem, and bring the sun back to Haifa. I’m the one who will demolish this whole damn checkpoint and bulldoze it over your grandfathers’ graves. I’m the one who will single-handedly bring back all the refugees, and deliver self-determination to the entire Arab world, I’m the one –’‘But you’re Kurdish. Why are you bothered about the Arabs?’

‘And you’re Russian. What do you care about Palestine?’

Pasts and futures merge into a frictional present. But mostly diaspora Jews come from everywhere to settle in the Promised Land — at the Palestinians’ expense.

Americans aren’t all that keyed-in or motivated to “help” the Palestinans fight the Israelis in courts and at the United Nations to secure their native homeland. People seem to have forgotten that the area of occupation — the whole region now known as Israel — was once, not long ago, on the map as Palestine. As mentioned earlier, settlers to West Bank have ruined Palestinian society and self-governance with their settlements, which expropriate Palestinian lands by armed and often-fanatical Zionists, who divide the West Bank with private roads. According to a 2015 Newsweek piece, Americans Jews are “over-represented” as settlers and, since the Oslo Accords in 1993, have helped grow the settler population from 110, 00 to 400, 000 and “helping make the two-state solution impossible.” “Why are so many US citizens moving to the West Bank?” is a recent and brief interview with settlers worth watching for its exploration of motivations.

What’s left out of those interviews is the hypocrisy and unmitigated evil some of these settlers bring with them to the West Bank. These Americans could not do, and would probably fight to make sure it never happened, what they do in the West Bank — bulldozing homes, creating barriers, and jigsaw private roads that cut off Palestinians from each other and require hours spent at checkpoints. A lot of these settlers go to Israel because the land is cheap, they are welcome, and it’s beautiful where they are going. But they are helping participate in an Apartheid system to obtain and sustain a contradictory lifestyle. This seems to be a facet of ugly Americanism that is common throughout the world — American middle class expats going to other countries, living often rent-free, and lording over the locals, enjoying the privilege of hiring the locals as servants for paltry wages, etc.

There’s been resistance to such treatment over the years. Plenty of American Jews are vocal in their opposition to settlers participating in a system that smells of hypocrisy and apartheid. Palestinian resistance to the Occupation began in earnest with Yassir Arafat, the first president of the Palestinian National Authority, and co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat, for all his alleged faults, undeniably pushed for autonomy and self-rule — a struggle that continues, but without effective or visionary leadership. He called for the First Intifada (‘uprising’) in December 1987, following an incident at the Erez checkpoint during which four Palestinians were accidentally killed by an Israeli and set off an emotional firestorm. It lasted until 1993. The Second Intifada (known as Al-Aqsa) went from 2000-2005.

From Carl Jung to Margaret Mead, we ‘ve learned as humans over time that we will seek answers to continuous horrible events by collectively believing in supernatural forces, which often coalesce around atavistic figures imbued with special mysterious powers to be feared. “Badia’s Magic Water” by Maya Abu al-Hayat is a story of sympathetic magic — word gone out — rumors that — there’s talk — people are saying that this woman Badia has a magic potion that heals. Born of a dead baby lost during the First Intifada, after which she developed eczema, Badia’s herbal potion cures it, and as she takes a job washing the dead, providing their last ablutions and shrouding, she gains a rep as a healer.

Folks come from all around Ramallah to get some of Badia’s holy water. Sometimes they go to extremes, Badia recalls, with regret: the woman who once snuck into the autopsy room to steal some of the magic water that had spilled off a girl’s corpse, to use it for some spell or ritual, who, when Badia tried to remove her, had bent down to where the water pooled on the ground and tried to lick it up.

You can’t help but interpret such extreme behavior as a failure of modernity to take hold in a culture beset by the mindset of ancient and tyrannical bugaboos. There’s a biblical apocrypha feel to it. It seems like it will take a miracle to save the Palestinians. But, at the same time, though Badia can’t help “those that don’t believe,” she is self-amused at her power. Al-Hayat expresses it with simplicity: No dead today: the schedule is blank. Badia sighs, removes her coat, puts on her clean white gown, and drinks the special tea of herbs she brewed herself.

Superstitions, right? They are even behind the Occupation, when you think about it.

The Book of Ramallah is a simple, concrete collection of tales that reveals some of the ‘tender mercies’ and often-humorous day-to-day travails of Palestinas going about their business under Israeli occupation. The tales humanize and almost laugh at political solutions to anything. In doing so, they help us re-realize, paradoxically, that a political solution is a decision of people, not autonomous systems of power. It’s a gentle, non-confronting set of stories that bring refreshing energy to the ongoing crisis for Palestinians in the West Bank and elsewhere in their diaspora.

Readers who want a deeper, more engaging (but entertaining) understanding of how the region fell so miserably into conflict between the Palestinians, largely displaced from their homeland, and Israelis who see their state as a historical and spiritual manifest destiny, may want to watch the 4-part BBC series The Promise (2011), which recounts the events that led to the turmoil, beginning with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the realignment of Arabia by the British, the promise made to Jews in The Balfour Declaration, and the Never Again militancy brought to Jewish emigration to the region by the Holocaust.

There is one unique problem with « The Promise ». It brings you back to the Second Intifada without mentioning that the Palestinians stopped their attacks on Israel in 2005 and replace dit by the pacific BDS Movement of Boycott, whereas Israel never stoppe dits terrorist attacks on Palestinian Occupied Territories.

NTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix