Getting Home

After my flight from tel aviv i had plans to travel to china with one of my friends from home. we met up in LA for our flight, which was somewhat tiring having already come from the east, and then flying around the world west without any real chance to take a break or go home anywhere. My trip to china was sponsored and subsidized by the chinese government, which made the trip cheap and therefore appealing to me. Unfortunately after my time in palestine i was having a bit of a struggle with this concept. China is a country that is occupying Tibet, which wants to be free. They are able to do this because they are more powerful, more violent, and because the rest of the world wants to keep good enough relations with them not to interfere much. It is of course not entirely the same, but im sure you can see how the situation looks familiar. The israeli government also subsidizes trips to their land and i remembered it being something that really bothered me, and now i was a part of it.

Israel is very good at what they do. I dont support it, but i certinaly can respect how genious much of it is. The whole area is just tiny even in comparison to my home state of texas. Its just a little country and everything is right there, and yet all these people come through and see nothing. Even tourists to bethlehem come on israeli tours and stay in israeli hotels in jerusalem instead. They bring them through and they show them only what they want them to see and then they go home and say 'ive been there, and israel was great and i didnt see any of that 'opression' stuff you were talking about' and spread these kinds of ideas to the public making the things im saying look like some kind of leftist exaggeration of the truth, when in reality they didnt see anything.

This is now what i felt i was a part of in china. We took strange routes to places, which i believed had a purpose in trying to go around poverty and other things that may make the government look bad. We stayed in hotels on the outskirts of town so that it was difficult to access the city and the people. We saw only what they wanted us to see, we did only what they wanted us to do. When we went to tianemen square for example, they didnt mention anything about the massacre that happened when students tried to hold a non violent protest there, this event is known to many americans as 'the day democracy died' in china, and it is the most well known thing about it. It was all reminicent of my time in Israel, the rewriting of history and events. Most maps in israel carefully leave off big cities in the west bank, bethlehem is nearly never featured, though there is nothing else really to call it this area is usually either called 'greater jerusalem' or left completley blank. This propeganda machine was really getting under my skin and while i was in china i had to keep reminding myself that there is more to it than what i had been allowed to see, and as long as i kept that in mind then i was doing alright. I had seen only one clip from the news while i was there, i suppose an israeli soldier shot himself in front of the french president as he was leaving tel aviv. I thought maybe this was going to be some sort of statement, but its all just been written off as insanity. All things considered, it was a good trip through china, we saw alot of things but i just had some trouble really being moved by things that are just things because nobody was telling me the politics of any of it, their real signifigance to the people, and without the human element for me it was just alot of pretty things. After that week and a half in china i returned home. The whole journey was exhausting and i was having some trouble reconciling everything that had happened with the resuming of my old life before i had known any of it. I was tired, upset, and feeling isolated.