That’s Not Light You See

It’s Wednesday, I know, a ridiculous day for such thoughts, but out on the morning jog I couldn’t stop thinking about Kant. I tried the weather (it’s hot, again) and the news, but nothing stuck. (Tell me: is it absurd to admire Glenn Greenwald even more because his boyfriend is cute?) So: Kant, the categorical imperative, Wednesday morning, hot again, how fucked it is that the ethical should be grounded in something so arrogant and yes, imperialist, as the universalization of the petty, stunted self, how narrow and how closed a system. Isn’t the whole point not to smother everything with the awful, cloying sameness of self, to blast the whole thing open? The self, I mean, and Wednesday too. I don’t know how yet, but I’m trying.

I took this photo two days ago while driving through a tunnel, the longest in the West Bank. A kilometer and a half of concrete, really quite an achievement. The tunnel separates (or, for the optimists out there, connects) the villages of Bidu and al Jeeb, just southwest of Ramallah and north of Jerusalem. Once, you could walk to Jerusalem from here. There’s a wall now, or really several walls. The tunnel is now the sole entrance to Bidu and hence to the seven villages beyond it which have been collectively fenced off, not only from Jerusalem, but from the rest of the West Bank. Which means a single military jeep can, and sometimes does, shut off those villages entirely, locking them down. A prison by another name. How bright the sun is! The tunnel passes under what were once Palestinian agricultural lands, confiscated in the 1980s by surrounding Israeli settlements, and under Highway 443, which connects Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and extends into the settlement corridor of the central West Bank. From 2002 to until 2010, Israel prohibited Palestinian cars from traveling on 443. Theoretically, a Supreme Court decision that year opened the road to all, but, because there are so few access points open to Palestinians (residents of Bidu would have to climb, or tunnel upwards), the road remains largely segregated, a sort of horizontal, asphalt settlement. I haven’t mentioned, have I, the house I visited in Beit Ijza, one village over, that has been completely fenced off from its neighbors, that has its own wall, its own gate, a single-family prison? There is a world, I guarantee you, in which this sort of thing makes sense, is rational, moral, right. It’s right out there, on the other side of the wall.