Identity. It's a word that I have been working with lately, mostly focusing on a video that Greg and I are putting together regarding some of the youth that we work with and their feelings about the word refugee. But it also has led me to think deeply about my own identity: How do I introduce myself to people? Who do I think of myself as? How do others see me? Etc. Once again I am beginning a piece that might take pages to flush out, that will take me days, months...possibly years to process.

Into my whole identity adventure here over the last few months a new element entered today. What is today? The only reason I remembered it is because I received several emails wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving and I knew (again from emails) of many people's plans for this holiday time. And for the 3rd time in the last 4 years, here I am, in another country, far away from the festivities and many of the sentiments revolving around this holiday. What does it mean to think of Thanksgiving from where I currently live and work? I seem to have more questions than answers these days...to so many things.

I was hesitant to broadcast to my Palestinian friends that I had been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner with an American/Israeli family living in Jerusalem and, once again, with a heavy burden draped on my shoulders I made the only slightly troublesome trip through the checkpoint. I walked through the electronically operated turnstile, put my bag with sweets from the store across the street from Ibdaa on the X-ray conveyor belt, walked through the metal detector and flashed my passport at the armed guards on duty in the checkpoint booth. Their home is just on the other side of the WALL, only a few minutes walk from the checkpoint, literally 15 minutes from my home in Dheisheh yet a world apart in so many ways. I can't even begin to explain it.

I walked in the door to the wonderful familiar smells of Thanksgiving. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, homemade whole-wheat biscuits, sweet potatoes, salad and, of course, turkey piled on the tables set for roughly 20 people. As varied as the dishes of food on the table were the people attending this dinner. American, Jewish, Israeli, Swedish, Turkish and possibly more me mixed together. I found myself talking primarily with a couple citizens of Israel, academics, writers, a Mcarthur genius prize winner...not what I have been used to for this last phase of my life. I was the only person there having regular contact with the Palestinian refugees. A couple of my Palestinian friends asked if there were any Palestinians there...The meal was wonderful, the conversation insightful, the setting homey and familiar yet the context is still something I am struggling to grasp. After dinner and pumpkin pie I walked back down the cold street, through the sterile checkpoint, beside the WALL and got into a Palestinian friends car, he was waiting on the other side. We sped off back to Dheisheh.

Thanksgiving has never been about celebrating what the holiday is supposed to be about for me, it has always been a time of family, friends, community and the word together. I looked back this morning to remember where I have been during the last few thanksgiving holidays and I found my reflections from thanksgiving 2004 in Guatemala. Seems a world away. I read the first paragraph and was taken back to sitting around the fire.

(Written November 2004) "If this had been a usual thanksgiving four-day weekend it would have included a significant amount of time gorging myself on turkey, potatoes, and stuffing, laying lazily in front of whatever football game was playing with a beer in hand, dozing on the couch, etc. but, as by now should be evident, my life is anything but usual here in Guatemala. I spent this last Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving 2004 with the thoughts that there was no place I would rather be, no people I would rather be with, and no adventures I would rather be living. I ate Thanksgiving dinner seated in front of a roaring fire in the small kitchen next to the communal house of a tiny village nestled among the northwestern mountains of Guatemala. The kitchen had no doors and the metal sheets for roofing let in the sounds of the rain pounding down outside as a constant soundtrack to our peaceful intimate gathering. Around the fire we huddled, don Guadalupe, doña Petrona, and their daughter Patti from the village, a medic I was working with and, of course, me. We sat around that fire and shared a simple meal of potatoes mixed with rice and corn roasted next to the fire (called elote). I watched as don Guadalupe kept flipping the corn around next to the fire, his movements as natural as taking a deep breath, seeming not to notice the leaping flames that came dangerously close to burning him but incredibly never touching his small well worn hands. On this day of thanks I had more to be thankful for than I could have ever imagined."

What does that last line mean here for me in 2007? What am I thankful for? How do I feel about celebrating thanksgiving in a land where, to use probably a terrible metaphor, the Pilgrims and "Indians" cant quite get together for a meal...funny, the first letters of those words even correspond, Palestinians and Israeli's. Are the Annapolis talks like a sort of strange demented version of what has been constructed about this holiday by the historical myths of the first Thanksgiving Dinner? Where am I going with this?

I recently answered a questionnaire for Al-Jazeera about the talks in Annapolis.

How do you feel about the talks?

The talks are plastered all over the news in English and Arabic yet if you ask someone walking on the street here in Dheisheh Refugee Camp (as other news sources have done in the past few weeks) they will usually give an answer that, to me, always sounds the same. That there have been talks for years, that there have been promises for years and nothing has changed. After living and working here in Dheisheh I have begun to feel the same thing. And more than anything I am just curious, what will they talk about? What will they say is going to come out of this? I came to the Palestine/Israel area to learn about the problems here and see firsthand what was going on. While I admit that I am getting a very one-sided perspective on the issue, it is impossible to deny the almost contagious effect that occupation has on the soul. I live and work in a refugee camp and while I will never truly understand what it means to be a Palestinian refugee, I can walk the streets and feel what's in the air, I can travel through checkpoints and be part of the unnecessary harassment, I can walk beneath the WALL, I can watch the soldiers storm into the camp, I can talk with the youth here in the camp and listen to their frustrations but also their hopes and dreams. I can do all this but it's hard to think about something so far away, the talks in Annapolis. How will they reflect what's going on here on the ground?

When I listen to anyone on either side talk about the issue and I read about what has happened over the last 60 years I am struck by many things. For people on both sides off these issues what are "talks" going to accomplish? There have been talks, there have been promises and yet there has been no movement forward, no movement to find a solution to this issue that is even feasible. And once again, the United States has decided that since it sees a benefit for its own over inflated ego by currying the favor of the Arab states it has alienated with its foreign policies and the war in Iraq, that the US will play host to these talks, that it will try and paint itself as the mediator, the facilitator, even the possible savior of this division in the holy land. With no joint document, with each side refusing to lay on the table certain issues like Jerusalem and the status of the over 6 million Palestinian refugees, with each side coming to the table with a list of demands that crash up against each other, it is increasingly possible that they talks with be little more than political words floated in the air to make the US look better, to make people think that the Israeli government is trying, etc.

And what of the vast majority of the International population that is disillusioned to the true extent of the issue. I don't even know that much about it and I am sitting right in the middle of it. But I do know that the world doesn't see the correct picture of the Palestinians or the Israeli's, that they see what the media distorts the images to be, something to generate revenue. Violence happens in the streets and it makes the front page but the normal life of a Palestinian family, struggling to get by, with no thoughts of violence, with only the hope of seeing their children educated and not having to face some of the hardships that have plagued the previous generation, is seldom shown.

What would you like to come from them and what do you expect to come from them?

There are no words for what I would like to see come from the talks, I don't think that the word exists or is properly defined yet. I would like to see justice but as a Palestinian friend of mine put it to me the other day, "I don't know yet what is the meaning of justice, I know what injustice is but I am still struggling with the other." I expect that they will generate a lot of on camera time for US politicians, especially those embroiled in the high stakes poker game leading up to the next elections. I expect that we will hear a lot or words, a lot of talk that promises will be laid on the table but in the end, nothing will be accomplished. I mean, look at the fact that the UN resolutions that have been approved have never been enforced.

What are the key issues for you?

The checkpoints, the right of return, the refugees, a peaceful home for both Palestinians and Israeli's, the WALL, two states or one state, the continued illegal confiscation of land. All of these are key issues but the most critical issue of all is can these governments that are getting together move past all the political bullshit and actually look at the people this conflict is affecting? Can they stop lobbying for position in the world and actually get something right?

This has been a long entry so I will stop here, though my head is still spinning...