Matt's Writing

The title for this blog is from Saul Williams' book, which is a reference to the greatest manuscript find of the twentieth century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. My interview with Saul Williams on Fresh Air: The Alternative can be found here and on iTunes. Wikipedia writes about the story of the the find in 1947: According to rumor, a Bedouin goat herder named Mazra threw a rock into one of the caves, seeking a lost goat. The sound of pottery shattering drew him in, whereupon he discovered ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen. The site was later excavated, and over 900 documents were found spread throughout many caves in Quamran , which contain some of the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 AD. On Monday, December 22, 2008, I left Jerusalem on a Jewish tour of the Dead Sea, Masada, and Qumran. There were mainly middle-aged American Jews in the tour van with me, which held about 20 people. I had a great time with them, as we listened to our to...

Today was an emotional day. I took the call of the poster in my hostel in Old Jerusalem, and I went on an ICAHD tour of East Jerusalem, some settlements, and a bit of the Occupied Territories, or Palestine, or Greater Israel, or the Holy Land, or whatever terminology you use to describe the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River that is not officially Israel proper. ICAHD , the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions , is an Israeli non-violent, direct-action group that works against the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories . The first site we went to, pictured above, was right on the other side of the 1967 Green Line in East Jerusalem (traditionally the Palestinian side of Jerusalem). I spoke via a translator with an elderly Palestinian woman who had been forcefully evicted from her house right next to a new settlement. She said that she and her husband had lived there for decades, and had received many requests from the Israeli gov...