Israel’s Wall & Lost Hippies
From a piece in the New York Review of Books (our finest periodical):
QUOTE
And now I’m sitting having tea in the al-Kasaba cinema in Ramallah. It’s the only working cinema on the West Bank. Mostly it shows Egyptian comedies. It’s run by George Ibrahim, who’s laughing, as he usually is.
“At the moment we are all enjoying jokes about the Western economy going to pieces because we can laugh and say, ‘It won’t affect us because Palestine doesn’t have an economy….’” His friend the playwright Salman Tamer joins in.
“What is so shocking about Israel is that these days it doesn’t even have a protest movement. In the old days, there were peaceniks on the streets and long-haired students. Now they have almost no peace movement at all. What can you say? A country which loses its hippies is in deep trouble.”
George drinks his tea and smiles. “The wall is not around us. It’s around them.”
