Sleepless Dreamer > Recent Status Updates

People from my degree: wow, we had no idea you're so charismatic

Me, who has studied theater for 7 years and absolutely feels comfortable performing: indeed, my crippling imposter syndrome for the past three years has hid many things about me.

Criticizing Israeli laws is great but Ali could try to be accurate. Israeli law does not automatically grant citizenship to the spouses from enemy countries. That's it. If an Israeli Jew marries an Iraqi, they won't get Israeli citizenship. This isn't directly against Palestinians, it's true for every Israeli.

It does, however, disproportionally impact Palestinians & is problematic but let's be accurate first.

"Israel has always claimed that the ever-tighter sieges, closures and checkpoints are necessary for "security", particularly against potential Palestinian suicide attacks. Yet the system of wide-scale closures was instituted in 1991, three years before the first-ever suicide attack."

What a sneaky little sentence. The first SUICIDE attack was after. The first regular terror attacks were significantly before.

Uni adventures:

I spent so much of this degree feeling alone and yet, only now when it's about to end, I realize that I am surrounded by brilliant, kind and warm people.

(Not from my degree though, I was right about that)

Uni adventures:

The urge to tell my professor, "don't worry, I speak about philosophy in an emotional and metaphoric way but at the end, I write like a straight white male philosopher in the 20th century".

Being Israeli like Sunday is going to be sunny with a slight chance of rockets (intentionally shot into civilian areas as apparently war crimes are fine when Palestinias do them).

My opinion: there isn't going to be a war like last year. Yes, there's a level of rage in the Palestinian society but the political motivation isn't there. Maybe some fighting but nothing as intense as last year.

My professor: you kept saying "someone's child" but isn't it supposed to be "mother's child"?

me, a queer person: no <3

I suspect that there will be a romance with Sasuke and honestly? I'm not here for that.

Things that happen when you have enough chutzpah: You ask a seminar speaker from East Jerusalem for a ride.

Then, you abruptly realize that you're actually deep in the West Bank in a car with two Palestinians in the midst of a shitty security period.

Every bit of Israeli Trauma kicks in- you have made yourself a phenomenal target for kidnapping. So naive, so young, so hopeful.

Unlearning takes years & bravery

"Israel also enjoys a great ability to mobilize resulting from its feeling that it is waging a life-or-death battle and that consequently it has no alternative but to defend itself until its last breath."

This is a very accurate assessment- particularly in 1969 when this book was published. Nowadays, I often feel Palestinians forget this but this remains how much Israelis operate.

I don't mean to suggest that exam season & covid have led me to forget every single person I know but three different people have warmly approached me on campus today and I did not remember any of them.

This has been terribly awkward. I want to go hide in my room now, thanks.

Day 5 of writing a bachelor thesis in 8 days:

I have learned that:
a. there's another researcher who did basically my research but better than me

b. much of what I've done is actually not useful for my main argument and so, I need to find it in me to delete it, despite my emotional attachment.

But hey, I'm so close to finishing. There were many disappointments today but I think I can actually finish this. Wild.

“Nevertheless, the slow trajectory toward being the liberated “first” is evident in the fear it instills, for instance, among the residents of Nahal Oz, the 9 percent of Israeli citizens who suffer from PTSD or the “PTSD-related symptoms in several hundred [Israeli] soldiers” following the 2014 war in Gaza."

No? All this does is bolster radical right wing people who swear to demolish Gaza.

Uni adventures:

Is there anything more terrifying than a professor inexplicably asking to meet up before giving out grades?

Like oh my god, would it kill him to explain why he'd like us to meet? have I done something wrong???

Did this guy just blame Turkey for the May riots? The pro-Israel crowd has got to face that some Palestinian Israelis have a genuine identity crisis. When many learn in Palestinian universities, have family in Gaza and the WB and continue to feel wronged by the state, how can we be surprised? It's valid.

And dude, Israel has 2 million Arab citizens. The scale of the riots shows it's a minority that seeks violence.

A Palestinian starts stabbing Israeli civilians in the street and gets shot.

According to Sen, he gets shot because "the urge to eliminate the indigenous swiftly is central to the settler colonial endeavor."

Seriously, self care is not reading this book when 13 Israelis have been murdered in the last two weeks due to terror attacks. The actual audacity of blaming war crimes on the victim is too much.

The actual horror of being with a large group of teenagers when there's a big terror attack in Tel Aviv. I can see the radicalization, children growing up in a reality where that can just happen, where this is normal.

There's nothing really I can say right now that won't make them hate Palestinians. Nothing I can say can make them believe in a different reality.

I feel sick.

The urge to grab Israel's government by its shoulders and shake it like "why can't we have nice things?? why can't you get along???".

Being a proper centrist like I'm equally pissed at the secular leftish party as I am at the right wing religious party. It's not that hard to respect each other. You can't heal this divide by constantly trying to hurt each other for cheap politics.

me: I'm overwhelmed by life and need everything to stop for at least 5 days.

the universe/ God/ the 3 covid patients I met: here, you have covid without symptoms

This is seriously the best thing that could have happened to me now. Finally, some peace and quiet. I couldn't have asked for a better time and way to get The Plague.

Also, everyone in my life is so wholesome, how is this even legal, i am so so grateful

"Wow, this day has been full of distractions, finally I will have some time to properly study", I say naively before discovering that I potentially have covid and must spend the next few hours arguing with various people from university. Clearly the universe doesn't want me to study.

Me: Israelis aren't numb to violence

Also me: my only response to the six Israeli deaths from two ISIS terror attacks this week has been "what losers join ISIS? If you're already joining a terrorist group, at least don't join one that's basically lost. Really, Palestinian Israelis should improve their taste."

me, graduating high school: I’m done with math forever!

me, passing the university acceptance exam: No more math again!

me after surviving through the math courses of 1st year: that's the end of studying math!

me, passing the Economics classes: Finally, I'm free from math!

me, now, upon discovering that I have yet another math-heavy class: just this one class until I’ll be done with math forever!

me: life in Israel is frustrating, full of challenges. I should leave

also me: No other country shuts down almost completely for a funeral of a prominent rabbi. A million people (or 1 out of every 9 Israelis) are going to this man's funeral.

And the rest of the country has no idea why this rabbi is important. Our polarization is stunning, horrifying and charming all at once. I can't go anywhere.

Uni adventures:

I have not missed constantly swaying between "everyone here is so so smart, what am I doing, clearly there must be some mistake" to "this is so easy, why is this class so slow, I'm totally educated on this already" and back every 10 minutes.

uni adventures:

trying to convince my academic advisor that a philosophy class on war ethics can count as Politics credits like "maybe if more people involved with politics would take such classes, the world would be a better place"

Exactly a month ago, I wrote an essay about the ways in which a shift in the global hegemony will impact the economy (particularly trade and multinational companies). The essay was entirely theoretical, of course, and discussed changing into a bipolar hegemony.

Suffice to say that this essay did not age well and that this is not how I wanted to learn that I was right in my economic predictions.

“Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”


This is insanely vague. What is a country's territorial integrity? What if there's a territorial dispute?

"Who would willingly sign up to running in the rain with thousands of strangers for hours?" I ask, as I celebrate the end of exam season by doing precisely that.

In other news, the whole point of running is being able to tell people about it so yess, considering I haven't moved from my desk in weeks, I just ran a decent time for 10km while it was hailing. Everything hurts but I want to say it was worth it.

“... what mattered was not the land and its inhabitants as they actually were but the confirmation...

I like to think of my relationship to the land, where I have always lived, as immediate and not experienced through the veil of words written about it, often replete with distortions."

I really do feel like at times, Palestinians and Israelis get each other better than anyone else.

"Oh, I'm not that nervous about the grade for this exam, I know I'm going to re-do it because I only studied for 2 days and definitely wrote some nonsense", I say as I check for grades dozens of times cause maybe, just maybe, I magically got a better grade than what I think I deserve.