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the sudden nearness of the lost gardens made exile even more intolerable.
the path to liberation could be determined only by the Palestinians themselves.
"I believe in one thing: Palestine. And I hate one thing: occupation. And if you want to punish me, do it."
"just machines for killing.
"It's a horrible job, really horrible.
"How would you feel to leave your home, all your belongings, your entire spirit, in one place? Would you not fight to get it back with everything you have?"
"To us this lemon is more than fruit, Dalia," Bashir said slowly. "It is land and history. It is the window that we open to look at our history.
I can understand your longing for home because of our own experience of exile."
I could understand their longing for Falastin through my longing to Zion, to Israel.
"What you have gone through, it must have been a terrible experience."
That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land.
"You can go back where you came from,"
But anyone who came after 1917," Bashir said, "cannot stay."
"We have to live together. To accept each other."
"I'm very sorry, but this is not my problem," Bashir said quietly. "You stole our land from us.
You want to turn us, again, into refugees?"
"I'm only one person searching for the truth," she said. "And I found the thread that's going to take me there."
Had she befriended a terrorist?
It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now."
"pushing the Jews into the sea"
to see their struggle as against not Jews, but Zionism.
personal dialogue was the key to transformation.
If national interest comes before our common humanity," Dalia said, "then there is no hope for redemption, there is no hope for healing, there is no hope for transformation, there is no hope for anything!"
Dalia's family—they were all very kind. But what does that matter? They were the people who took our house."
"Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be," Habash had declared. "To kill, even if that means we in our turn become inhuman."
"the old Biblical rule of an eye for an eye."
Prison study groups pored over Hegel, Lenin, Marx, Jack London, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude, and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
He wanted to be one of the people,
Why open a wound? Why start all this again?
terror is indiscriminate. And I can be on one of these buses, tool!
"Palestine of tomorrow," whereby Arab and Jew would live side by side in a secular, democratic state.
To this day, to be a sadati is to be one who is weak, one who capitulates, one who acts cowardly,
if anyone thought that the Palestinians would react as Jesus Christ would have, he is wrong.
the angel Gabriel came to Dalia in a dream.
The heart wants to do something The heart wants to move toward the healing of that wound.
I want them to have the childhood that I never had. What I lost there, I want to give them."
"Why don't you do something?" Yehezkel asked.
"Maybe you could write about your history," Yehezkel replied. "About Bashir and the story of the house in Ramla."
"You can deport me," Jabril Rajoub would recall telling the judge. "But you cannot deport Palestine from my heart.
"If there will be peace, there will be no problem any more with the prisoners."
"They deserve to have an entity. Not the PLO, not a state, but a separate entity." Rabin believed that Israel could not agree to the Palestinians' central political demand—recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and to Yasser Arafat as their leader. To do so, Rabin argued, would require Israelis to compromise on the right of return for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that, the defense minister argued, would be "national suicide."
"Letter to a Deportee."
Each side has an ingenuity for justifying its own position. How long shall we perpetuate this vicious circle? . . .
Will the legacy of pain grow and harden with bitterness as it passes down the generations?
I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not resolve this conflict on its fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will.
our children will delight in the beauty and bounties of this holy land.
Some Palestinians were also beginning to believe that this compromise, embodied in UN Resolution 242, was the best way to end the conflict.
"He is asking for his father," Nuha said. "What do you tell him?" "That the Jews have deported him."
Why do you think Israelis are afraid of you?
"Because you are the only ones who have a legitimate grievance against us. And deep down, even those who deny it know it. That makes us very uncomfortable and uneasy in dealing with you. Because our homes are your homes, you become a real threat."
