Better Late Than Never

Wow. As the title states, "better late than never," I guess. As of this morning it has been exactly eight weeks since I arrived in Palestine and I have a little over four weeks left on my three month tourist visa. I had originally intended for this blog to be a resource both for myself and for potential (and hypothetical readers). Primarily, its intention was to help me keep my sanity. In a way, I feel I have already lost it completely and this blog should certainly be filed under the "too little too late" category. However, there are times (few and far between) when I do believe that I finally know more about myself and my priorities in this life than ever before. Enough about me.

The blog is secondly for you: my family, friends, colleagues from work and school, professors, and of course those few brave (and bored) individuals that have randomly followed the winding rivers of the internet straight to the turbulent sea that is this blog. I hope that my personal experiences here in Israel/Palestine can provide my readers with some insight beyond Western media and current Middle Eastern discourse into this seemingly intractable conflict. I had toyed with the idea of posting some history of the conflict, but have decided against it. This blog will be almost exclusively personal accounts of life in the West Bank. There are more than enough exhaustive resources out there both online and in print to make anyone who has the patience and passion to learn about the situation an expert. If you like would me to share some of these resources, please leave me a message as a comment to this post.

I have been keeping a small journal to record my experiences so some of the experiences from the first couple weeks will not simply be from my somewhat foggy memory of the past eight weeks. I do intend to mix experiences together. Very recent memories will surely share posts with experiences from the first couple weeks. The timeline is not important, but I hope the posts themselves are.

Lastly, a note on the title and the short excerpt that follows it. The title is in reference to an American named John Ledyard. Ledyard was an explorer, writer, academic, and close friend of Thomas Jefferson. In 1788 he became the first American to explore the Middle East and report back to Washington D.C. His findings helped to provide Americans with their first real glimpse of the Middle East. Before this, their ideas were shaped almost exclusively by the Bible and books like "1001 Arabian Nights". The passage I have included is from the prologue of Michael Oren's incredibly insightful book "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present." I found it incredible how description of Ledyard's impending journey still is so relevant to the U.S. relationship with the Middle East today, some 230 years later. After countless military (overt and covert) campaigns in the region, strategic economic partnerships, peace processes, and even asinine labeling of political groups and individuals in the region, Americans know infinitely more about Kabul, Baghdad, Beirut, Jerusalem, Tehran, and Riyadh than they did in 1776. Yet they also know disappointingly little about Afghanis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Israelis, Palestinans, Iranians, and Saudis than they should. American media refuses to fill in the blanks, opting to show burning city skylines in Iraq, gun-wielding fighters in Gaza, and Holocaust-denying dictators in Iran instead - as if these were the things that defined the Middle East.

This blog will certainly not fill that gap. Perhaps, it will provide an insight into the lives or ordinary people living in an extraordinary situation. If nothing else, it will be a collection of my thoughts on both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the experience of being an American in the West Bank.