Blog Post #3

In the third section of the book, Ghada Karmi talks about how she went back to Palestine, or Israel, as it is called now. She is trying to see if anything is familiar, and how her homeland has changed over the years. When she returns to it, she discovers that the country has been changed into a modern, highly populated country with much commercialism and modernization. She is rather disgusted because there are still villages where Arabs live, but this is right next to a big bustling city with tidy straight lawns and modern apartment complexes. The Arab villages are very full of poverty; the Jews and Israelis do not care about the Arabs, who were there before. I am so shocked that after so many years, the Jews have thought about what they did and haven't tried to solve the problem. The government is now being run by the army general. This is so bad that now the head of the country is the army. I have one message for the Jews and Palestinians: Sit down in a room. Put away ALL your guns and weapons. Put them somewhere where you won't touch them for years. Now, talk. Talk about all your worries and why you hate each other. What are ways you can get to be on talking terms. Now, see if you can't try and SHARE your land. Make peace with one another, and just stop fighting. Honestly, how hard is this? I believe that removing violence from both sides of the equation will result in a positive sum. If the leaders of both countries meet without any forms of violence and talk about the problem, then they can easily solve it and have peace. The teachers at school are teaching this to their kids, when the ones who need it most are the ones who seem to think that child slavery, feminine abuse, and electing an army general as president are okay. Get the word out there that the world is a sad place. It used to be a wonderful place filled with love, peace, and beauty, but men are making the world ugly. The Earth is dying slowly, and it is our fault. So, if we sort out this little problem, then maybe we can take a look at the problem at hand. Saving the Earth and reducing our use of plastic!!!!!!

BLOG POST #2
The thing that really made me wonder is the "kinship ties", how Muslims have to know each other's history, where they came from, who their family was. It's really different from our culture, how we don't really care where someone comes from, and who their family is. On page 185, Ghada describes how meeting other Palestinian families in Golders Green was exciting for her mother, because it was a way for her to determine where they came from, and also to have relief that the country was still there and it hadn't disappeared mysteriously. She also explains that sometimes just the surname is all that is necessary to determine one's place of origin. "Kinship is the most basic principle of putting individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. The basic sort of kinship is to belong to the same family by birth. Kinship tells us how we are related to our family or each other, through our biology and history. Kinship can be a complex system of social groups. It is a universal system as everyone has a family. Some small and large scale societies use kinship not only for human reproduction but for “economic transactions, the political system and [their] religious beliefs” (J.Hendry, 1999)." "Kinship." - Simple English Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. Through kinship, we can find someone's origins just by knowing the level of class, because for example if someone was of the peasant class, then they would use their father's first name as their surname. For example, I were of that class, my name would be Tristanio Alfredo, because that is my father's name.