- What do you tell a father whose neighborhood has just
been bombed? For the hundredth time? "Okay dad, hang in
there..."
-
- The level of inhumanity has risen. The injustice has
never been so deep, so rooted and dominant. Palestinians are collectively
murdered. Concentration camps are established to host hundreds of civilian
detainees, with blue numbers on their arms. Children and women are
slaughtered
with impunity.
-
- Yet the world is yet to rise, yet to challenge Israel's
apartheid, yet to scream in anger. And Sharon, the oldest war criminal
to go unchallenged remains free, meeting with the press, testing his wit
while making funny comments to journalists.
-
- I am in my office, overwhelmed with reports of
Palestinians
killed. Numbers fly all around me: 19 killed in Jablia; 23 killed in Jenin;
13 killed in Balata; 5 killed in Ramallah. Then new numbers. I get all
confused; 12 killed in Jenin. Are these new victims in Jenin? I go to the
Arabic press to check the names. Yep, brand new ones, a brand new row of
calm faces folded in Palestinian flags to be buried in Jenin today.
-
- My heart screams, a scream that mistakenly manages to
escape and come out loud. "Are you okay?" a concerned voice from
the living room follows. "I am fine, I just hit my knee," I
reply.
It seems that I have been hitting my knee too often these days.
-
- ..More people killed, as innocent as human innocence
can ever be. People with names, hopes and dreams. People who missed their
favorite TV shows that day. People who left behind children with little
milk, wives with no money, husbands with six children to care for, mothers
with nothing but an old black and white photo to remember the loved
ones.
-
- ..More coffins are being built, more pictures are being
framed to be hung on cracked walls, more agony and despair, more long
nights
filled with tears, more bullets echoing in the air, some fleeting away,
and others landing in a stomach, a head or a heart.
-
- ..And more of my long distance telephone calls.
"Dad,
are you okay?, I heard that they killed several in the camp." He
replies,
"I am fine, but I think that the apaches are back. Can you hear
this?",
then "boom, boom," explosions fly everywhere.
-
- I get nervous, worried. Once the explosions die down,
and the apache leaves, I always get worked up: what do you tell a father
whose neighborhood has just been bombed? For the hundredth time? "Okay
dad, hang in their," was one of the last words I used to use to close
a telephone conversation. Then, "Our hearts are with you," and
"Let's keep on praying," ..
-
- But recently, when the killing turned into massacres,
I could no longer find the appropriate words. Awkward silence now dominates
most of my telephone calls to my family and friends in Palestine.
-
- My brother's car was bombed while standing in front of
his house. He is a nurse, and used the car to circulate Ramallah in times
of Israeli bombardment looking for wounded to help. I was planning to call
him and congratulate him for the new used car. I found myself calling to
congratulate him that the shell didn't explode in his house, a few feet
away from where his children soundly slept.
-
- But what is most angering about this is that not many
seem to care, or not many seem to care about Palestine in particular. The
US media goes on a frenzy when Palestinians retaliate by attacking and
killing Israelis. Europe loses control of its diplomatic manners and
occasionally
criticizes Israel. Hesitant criticism though, infrequent and with little
political weight. The US controls the global political arena, mainly in
the Middle East, and the US government chooses to stay blind, to back the
Israeli war on civilians, occasionally calling on Sharon to show restraint,
and on Palestinians to die quietly without much fuss.
-
- The Israeli human rights organization, B'tselem, which
has been more critical of its own government than most of the major US
rights groups combined, reported that Israeli soldiers categorize
Palestinian
detainees by writing blue numbers on their arms.
-
- Thousands of Palestinians have been detained as children
and men between the ages of 15 and 60 are rounded up and taken into Israeli
concentration camps.
-
- Does this ring a bell in the mind of this apathetic world
of ours?
-
- B'tselem reported, "dozens of unarmed Palestinian
civilians have been killed, including children and medical personnel. In
every city and refugee camp that they have entered, IDF soldiers have
repeated
the same pattern: indiscriminate firing and killing of innocent civilians,
intentional harm to water, electricity and telephone infrastructure, taking
over civilian homes, extensive damage to civilian property, shooting at
ambulances and prevention of medical care to the injured."
-
- It added, "a black flag of illegality flies over
the military actions that cause such widespread civilian
casualties."
-
- Hundreds of Israel's own soldiers refuse to fight a
corrupt,
inhumane war against civilians, simply to silence a nation's cry for
freedom.
Many of Israel's own reservists refuse to take part in war crimes committed
against a nation that is left to fight on its own, yet is accused of being
terrorist.
-
- I still wonder why Palestinian blood provokes little
anger; ignites little criticism; why are Israel's war crimes considered
a war on terror? Why are the American people so marginalized, hardly
knowing
what is being done with their own tax money? Why are Palestinian children
not counted as human beings? Why do Palestinian mothers compel little
solidarity
from mothers in the West? A million more whys, and too a few
answers.....
-
- Just in: 36 more Palestinians killed in the West Bank
and Gaza.
-
- I better stop before my words turn into screams. If only
the world could hear me....
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