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“You cannot take the child there,” the soldier said in thick, broken Arabic. “Why not?” “Reporters.” “You’re afraid the world might see what you do to children?” “Shut up. I will shoot you here, if you like,” he warned, raising his rifle, but also, strangely, smiling. Unperturbed, she replied, “Do it. You are no different from Nazis who stood in my way when I cared for Jews in the Second World War.”
Echoes of today
we could see Israeli soldiers perched on their lookout posts. Arrogant conquerors, they. Murderers and thieves. I hated them
those days entrenched themselves in my memory as particles of bloodied dust and the putridly sweet scent of rotting life and scorched soil. We moved but went nowhere. We looked, but reality blurred our vision. We inhaled and exhaled the dust of carnage, but we were not breathing. As
Jamal’s life had ended as an “example.” Soldiers executed him in front of my brother and fifty others.
He was sixteen years old when he became an example.
He was part of the battalion that was supposed to provoke the Syrians into retaliation so Israel could take the Golan Heights.
Moshe Dayan instructed them to send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot.
David’s unit was told to advance the tractors until the Syrians were provoked into shooting. They used artillery and la...
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Soldiers ruled their lives arbitrarily. Who could and could not pass was up to them, and not according to any protocol.
Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom
I cried, not for this woman’s death, but for my mother, who had departed that body years before.
“We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health. How you use the gifts of Allah to help yourself and humanity is ultimately how you honor him. I
On its first day of occupation, Israel bulldozed the entire Moroccan neighborhood of some two hundred ancient houses and several hundred residents, who were given less than two hours’ notice to evacuate. Muslims and Christians alike, Greeks and Armenians saw most of their property confiscated, while they themselves were evicted to ghettos or exiled.
Talking About Jerusalem
In July 1981, Israeli jets killed two hundred civilians in a single raid on Beirut,
Even Israel will not bomb a hospital,”
on June 6, 1982. Israel attacked Lebanon.
How does an Israeli soldier, a Jewish man, watch a refugee camp being transformed into an abattoir?
“How much must we endure and how much must we give?”
Ariel Sharon remained free to pursue the politics of violence, until eventually he rose to the highest office of power in Israel, becoming prime minister of the Jewish state. The citizens of Israel elected him on February 6, 2001, more than a year into the second Palestinian uprising, and the American press described him as “a portly old warrior”
George W. Bush, referred to him as a “man of peace.”
Ref to Sharon!
the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust.
It was a tale of war, its chilling, burning, and chilling-again fire. Of
while Arabs sought Jews, any Jews, to exact vengeance after 1948.
“Since when does ‘the world’ give a goddamn about us?
Palestinians
To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?
When Israel finally opened the camp, the UN never came. The American congressmen who tour suicide-bombing sites and express eternal allegiance to Israel never came. Jenin buried fifty-three bodies in a communal grave, Amal among them, but hundreds remained missing.
The official report of the United Nations, prepared by men who never visited Jenin and spoke to neither victim nor victimizer, concluded that no massacre had taken place. The conclusion was echoed in U.S. headlines: “NO MASSACRE IN JENIN.” “ONLY MILITANTS KILLED IN JENIN, SAYS ISRAEL.”
Although the characters in this book are fictitious, Palestine is not, nor are the historical events and figures in this story.
