Yesterday was special. Gwylène had organized the latest ‘Tiny Investigations’ session around an invitation to reflect on the Palestinian conflict. She had picked a Palestinian poet and former ROOTS member and Project South activist to facilitate the reunion. The meeting was both in person – on Devereaux – and on Zoom. Rasha, the Palestinian poet was virtual, as well as Darryl and two others. She might as well have been among us! GG had installed a projector which showed her so vividly and clear-voiced that her message reached all of us forcefully. We were not as much intimidated as we were physically impacted.

Marcus was with us in person, for the first time as a member of the group. I looked to him to animate and stimulate us with his very knowledgable remarks and the way he relates to the local – an essential missing part of TiP so far, although Victoria works at it constantly but with a PR outlook, not Marcus’s activism. When asked to point to three instances where each of us had faced a Palestine moment, in the past, more recently and ‘here and now’, I took the opportunity to recall the first Nakba, when I was still at home, in a family mostly racist, colonialist and fully reactionary! Although I cannot remember the facts, I assume that at the time, I was already shocked by my parents’ attitude vis-a-vis ‘others’. It had not taken me long to choose the party of the weak and the poor, like the factory workers my father was managing at the time.

For a more recent instance, I chose my long nights, listening to the BBC. It seams to me, I said, that since the newest invasion of Palestine, people I heard, journalists mostly, have a harder time dissociating the Palestine reality from that of Israel, and mostly commenting on the abusive violence of Israel and its reliance on the notion of punishment.

As for the here and now, I chose to evoke my reading about the plight of Bilha and Yakovi Inon, early victims of the Palestinian intrusion into Israel, burned alive in they house at the border. Yakovi was known for his steady pro-Palestinian stands and on his insistance on the importance of Israeli-Palestinian talks to kindle and rekindle HOPE in a peaceful future. His words inspired me and I came up with the phrase noted in this diary a few days ago: It takes two to hope.

Obviously, my choice of Yakovi and of the word Hope was fully counterintuitive! I did not even control it. It was propelled out of me by my resistance muscle, which I always trust to keep me from sheepish acquiescence. Even in as favorable a situation as a TinyisPowerful meeting, and facing as undeniable a presence as that of Rasha, using the HOPE word made my refusal to conform very clear, even to the inevitably pro-Palestinian stance of our guest. And at the risk of shocking the younger ones. I liked that Marcus and Pam were very objective under fire. As for Rayn, she did not want to commit without deeper thinking. I may be able to ask her about her guarded attitude tomorrow, during the Creative Sync!

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And then, there was that surprise paper bag, on the bench, outside the kitchen! Our neighbor – whose name we still don’t know – had deposited it earlier on with, inside, a delicious cream of celery soup. So good that we will share it tonight with Norma and Norman, formerly from Island Breeze, the now defunct Caribbean restaurant at Mosquito Beach.

Again, Gwylène and I note how more comfortable we are with most African Americans than with straitlaced, white Americans. The three folks mentioned above are Black. GG and I surmise that we share with them the ‘minority’ status, an outsider quality which has served us greatly in our in/with community art work.