Palestinians...speak now or forever hold your peace
June 3rd 2010 13:14
and the ghosts of the Middle East have suffered in (relative) silence...it is a silent tune we know all too well.....
Since the age of thirteen I have watched a people suffer so greatly that I did not need clarification from an adult as to which side was the ‘bad side’ and which side was the victim. Nothing was clearer than the brutal killing of a Palestinian man shielding his son from Israeli fire but my mother clarified it anyway with a series of harsh swear words in Arabic.
When I was fifteen we were taken to the Jewish Museum of History where I saw that Jews were once treated like animals and I was appropriately appalled. I also make connections with that past to my present and I am appalled for a different reason altogether - that I have lived to see another tragedy of the same nature. I imagine that as a fifteen-year-old with my current knowledge, I may have better understood the kind of tragic victimhood that may lead to an inhumane blockade on Gaza which forces this malnourished and perishing population to eat grass out of desperation.
At the end of the museum tour, after watching a Jewish woman break down in heaving sobs after recollecting her incarceration, I saw the insidious side note in my peripheral vision, detailing the next saga of this tragedy: why Israel was created. The Palestinians were not mentioned at all because in the psyche of most, they never existed. It is this way of thinking that has permeated the conflict. How can we be at war with a people that do not exist?
That day I was unknowingly a witness to the real tragedy which had barely begun. I wonder what my fifteen-year-old self would have thought if she knew what was to come? I remember the exact moment in year 9 history, when my favourite, crazy red haired teacher taught me the only things I thought I would need to know in life. At that precise moment of learning about the Holocaust, the shock horror that came from this realisation led me to believe the following - 'how lucky are we, that we don't have to go through the same horrors of history'. To this day I claim that moment to be the most ignorant of my young life.
When I was seventeen I argued with my father that the Palestinians are helpless, tiny warriors against David, Goliath, Moses and an even bigger enemy – Israeli tanks. They cannot do more than they are already doing. They only have rocks. The world ignores them. What more can you ask of them? But I was wrong and my father was right. If they boycotted Israel tomorrow, the world would sit up and listen because Israel would cease to function without the labour from the backs of the Palestinians.
The year before last I was twenty, and before I left Australia to immigrate to Spain, just like my Grandfather did all those years ago from Lebanon to Australia, I watched a video of my Grandfather presenting a speech in support of the Palestinians. Everyone in the room applauded him, including us in his memory. Behind closed doors, people sent him death threats. The Christian Lebanese ignored his efforts. Support the enemy? Support the Muslims? It was almost unheard of. But that didn’t stop him. Nothing could stop him. His courage and bravery filter through to me and make me want to scream this out for the world to hear. We haven’t forgotten you. But have you forgotten yourselves? Rise up, we whisper. And I have a sudden flashback to not wanting to kiss my grandfather because of his scratchy white beard. Because I could hear his booming voice echoing across the house and I feared him. Only to learn he was the kindest of souls, gentle and loving. His voice reverberated because he had so much love to give and his heart was breaking for the oppressed, the Palestinians.
Last year I was twenty-one and appalled at the situation Iran found itself in. No one should die for the right to be heard, for the right to express their liberty, to be free. No one should have to die for freedom. No one should have to die for their land. But people die every day, only which side of the fence do these people reside under? Because this determines how much we should care about their deaths. No one should have to die because they were born Palestinian in a certain geographical location and then discriminated against on the basis of their religion, forgotten because their deaths are insignificant. No.
Every day Palestinians die for freedom, whether it’s the emotional torture and humiliation or their physical annihilation in the form of Gaza and countless massacres against their nameless faces. The brutal massacre of Sabra and Chatila, declared an act of genocide in 1982 when an IDF controlled Palestinian and Lebanese refugee camp was stormed by the Christian Lebanese Forces Militia group (militia being a nicer word for terrorist organisation). Nor is the bus full of innocent Palestinian refugees mentioned as they were brutally slaughtered by the Christian Phalangists. No one even knows who those twenty seven people were. This is never mentioned as the true instigator of the Lebanese civil war.
It’s not enough to see nameless graves, wooden coffins in children sizes being carried over crowds flooded by tears, followed by a quick bulletin voiceover and then it disappears. Their faces will not be remembered, souls frozen in time will not become martyrs, and their names will not be printed in ink. We will never know how they died. YouTube does not show us these images, so these images don’t exist. The heartache will not reverberate across the Middle East and there is no solidarity with the Palestinian people. They will suffer for as long as Western democracies decide they should suffer or for as long as Israel continues to make them dance on hot plates. The dance of death for the Palestinians has only just begun and there is no end in sight.
The Iranian people who were protesting deserved the freedom of tomorrow. They risked their lives and stood up in defiance. Their headlines reverberated around the world the way the injustice of the Palestinian massacres ought to. I admired their courage more than anything else I have witnessed in my twenty two years of existence. But I envy them too. I envy their willpower and determination and I do not know from which source it has come from. I do not understand the history and the context which led to such an outpouring of anger. But I know the Palestinians have more than enough ammunition to orchestrate a similar uprising. I just don’t know how many birthdays I will celebrate before I see it or if I will still have years left to document a change I have waited for since adolescence.
The Palestinians are running out of options. No amount of protesting or international support will save them now. They only have themselves. They have only had themselves since the beginning, living in a selfish world like this one.
The Palestinians must rise up and leave their land, their homes, and their hearts, everything they know and leave the Israelis to their own destruction. Let the land of biblical Israel materialise into the myth procreated by the Zionist empire: A Land with No People for a People with no Land. Israel, without the Palestinians, you will forever remain in a land of no people, a purgatory that will always look behind its shoulder at the enemies it has procured since its inception. Israel, you will forever live in fear of the crimes you have committed and the ethnic genocide you perpetuated, which forced the greatest migration since the Ice Age. If the Palestinians rise up in this way, you will regret your own existence and the rhetoric of ‘they must accept our right to exist’ will soon forever be mimicked as the greatest joke of all time, from the People who are truly No People without the neighbours with whom they once peacefully co-existed, before Zionist interference.
Rise up O Palestine and leave your sorrow in a land of sorrows. Your future is not here. Forgive one day – but never forget and neither will I, aged and wearied by time, remembering the moment when something in my heart finally started to crack...
Since the age of thirteen I have watched a people suffer so greatly that I did not need clarification from an adult as to which side was the ‘bad side’ and which side was the victim. Nothing was clearer than the brutal killing of a Palestinian man shielding his son from Israeli fire but my mother clarified it anyway with a series of harsh swear words in Arabic.
When I was fifteen we were taken to the Jewish Museum of History where I saw that Jews were once treated like animals and I was appropriately appalled. I also make connections with that past to my present and I am appalled for a different reason altogether - that I have lived to see another tragedy of the same nature. I imagine that as a fifteen-year-old with my current knowledge, I may have better understood the kind of tragic victimhood that may lead to an inhumane blockade on Gaza which forces this malnourished and perishing population to eat grass out of desperation.
At the end of the museum tour, after watching a Jewish woman break down in heaving sobs after recollecting her incarceration, I saw the insidious side note in my peripheral vision, detailing the next saga of this tragedy: why Israel was created. The Palestinians were not mentioned at all because in the psyche of most, they never existed. It is this way of thinking that has permeated the conflict. How can we be at war with a people that do not exist?
That day I was unknowingly a witness to the real tragedy which had barely begun. I wonder what my fifteen-year-old self would have thought if she knew what was to come? I remember the exact moment in year 9 history, when my favourite, crazy red haired teacher taught me the only things I thought I would need to know in life. At that precise moment of learning about the Holocaust, the shock horror that came from this realisation led me to believe the following - 'how lucky are we, that we don't have to go through the same horrors of history'. To this day I claim that moment to be the most ignorant of my young life.
When I was seventeen I argued with my father that the Palestinians are helpless, tiny warriors against David, Goliath, Moses and an even bigger enemy – Israeli tanks. They cannot do more than they are already doing. They only have rocks. The world ignores them. What more can you ask of them? But I was wrong and my father was right. If they boycotted Israel tomorrow, the world would sit up and listen because Israel would cease to function without the labour from the backs of the Palestinians.
The year before last I was twenty, and before I left Australia to immigrate to Spain, just like my Grandfather did all those years ago from Lebanon to Australia, I watched a video of my Grandfather presenting a speech in support of the Palestinians. Everyone in the room applauded him, including us in his memory. Behind closed doors, people sent him death threats. The Christian Lebanese ignored his efforts. Support the enemy? Support the Muslims? It was almost unheard of. But that didn’t stop him. Nothing could stop him. His courage and bravery filter through to me and make me want to scream this out for the world to hear. We haven’t forgotten you. But have you forgotten yourselves? Rise up, we whisper. And I have a sudden flashback to not wanting to kiss my grandfather because of his scratchy white beard. Because I could hear his booming voice echoing across the house and I feared him. Only to learn he was the kindest of souls, gentle and loving. His voice reverberated because he had so much love to give and his heart was breaking for the oppressed, the Palestinians.
Last year I was twenty-one and appalled at the situation Iran found itself in. No one should die for the right to be heard, for the right to express their liberty, to be free. No one should have to die for freedom. No one should have to die for their land. But people die every day, only which side of the fence do these people reside under? Because this determines how much we should care about their deaths. No one should have to die because they were born Palestinian in a certain geographical location and then discriminated against on the basis of their religion, forgotten because their deaths are insignificant. No.
Every day Palestinians die for freedom, whether it’s the emotional torture and humiliation or their physical annihilation in the form of Gaza and countless massacres against their nameless faces. The brutal massacre of Sabra and Chatila, declared an act of genocide in 1982 when an IDF controlled Palestinian and Lebanese refugee camp was stormed by the Christian Lebanese Forces Militia group (militia being a nicer word for terrorist organisation). Nor is the bus full of innocent Palestinian refugees mentioned as they were brutally slaughtered by the Christian Phalangists. No one even knows who those twenty seven people were. This is never mentioned as the true instigator of the Lebanese civil war.
It’s not enough to see nameless graves, wooden coffins in children sizes being carried over crowds flooded by tears, followed by a quick bulletin voiceover and then it disappears. Their faces will not be remembered, souls frozen in time will not become martyrs, and their names will not be printed in ink. We will never know how they died. YouTube does not show us these images, so these images don’t exist. The heartache will not reverberate across the Middle East and there is no solidarity with the Palestinian people. They will suffer for as long as Western democracies decide they should suffer or for as long as Israel continues to make them dance on hot plates. The dance of death for the Palestinians has only just begun and there is no end in sight.
The Iranian people who were protesting deserved the freedom of tomorrow. They risked their lives and stood up in defiance. Their headlines reverberated around the world the way the injustice of the Palestinian massacres ought to. I admired their courage more than anything else I have witnessed in my twenty two years of existence. But I envy them too. I envy their willpower and determination and I do not know from which source it has come from. I do not understand the history and the context which led to such an outpouring of anger. But I know the Palestinians have more than enough ammunition to orchestrate a similar uprising. I just don’t know how many birthdays I will celebrate before I see it or if I will still have years left to document a change I have waited for since adolescence.
The Palestinians are running out of options. No amount of protesting or international support will save them now. They only have themselves. They have only had themselves since the beginning, living in a selfish world like this one.
The Palestinians must rise up and leave their land, their homes, and their hearts, everything they know and leave the Israelis to their own destruction. Let the land of biblical Israel materialise into the myth procreated by the Zionist empire: A Land with No People for a People with no Land. Israel, without the Palestinians, you will forever remain in a land of no people, a purgatory that will always look behind its shoulder at the enemies it has procured since its inception. Israel, you will forever live in fear of the crimes you have committed and the ethnic genocide you perpetuated, which forced the greatest migration since the Ice Age. If the Palestinians rise up in this way, you will regret your own existence and the rhetoric of ‘they must accept our right to exist’ will soon forever be mimicked as the greatest joke of all time, from the People who are truly No People without the neighbours with whom they once peacefully co-existed, before Zionist interference.
Rise up O Palestine and leave your sorrow in a land of sorrows. Your future is not here. Forgive one day – but never forget and neither will I, aged and wearied by time, remembering the moment when something in my heart finally started to crack...
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