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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ahdaf Soueif
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November 16 - November 26, 2023
So even though the bridge connects Jordan to the occupied Palestinian territories, it is under Israeli – rather than Palestinian Authority – control and is the first point at which the visitor is subject to Israeli procedures.
with the attempts to erase our people from the memory of history and from the map of this place.
Iya, penjajah nggak cuma menargetkan setiap makhluk hidup yang ada di Palestina. Mereka juga menargetkan tempat² bersejarah dan perpustakaan yang berisi arsip² bersejarah (bahkan dokumen² sebelum invasi eropa)
There are now those who are dancing on the graves of our dead, and who consider our Nakba their festival. But the Nakba is not a memory; it is an ongoing uprooting, filling Palestinians with dread for their very existence. The Nakba continues because the occupation continues. And the continued occupation means a continued war. This war that Israel wages against us is not a war to defend its existence, but a war to obliterate ours.
Dancing on the graves: ada beberapa video yang beredar, idf nggak cuma menari, menginjak-injak, tapi juga menghancurkan nisan² salib. Roket mereka pun menargetkan kuburan orang² islam.
Nakba di sini maksudnya adalah kejadian tahun 1948 (in case you don't know). Di mana orang² Palestina (kurang lebih 700 ribu orang) dipaksa keluar dari desa mereka dan mengungsi.
A wall not to separate Palestinians from Israelis, but to separate Palestinians from themselves and from any view of the horizon. Not to separate history from myth, but to weld together history and myth with a racist ingenuity.
Aku lupa di menit ke berapa bagian ini dibahas
https://youtu.be/pYxSC8ybGgg?si=1PRqP1onxw9n-kbb
Life here, as you see, is not a given, it’s a daily miracle. Military barriers separate everything from everything. And everything – even the landscape – is temporary and vulnerable. Life here is less than life, it is an approaching death. And how ironic that the stepping-up of oppression, of closures, of settlement expansion, of daily killings that have become routine – that all this takes place in the context of what is called the ‘peace process’, a process revolving in an empty circle, threatening to kill the very idea of peace in our suffering hearts.
Here, on this slice of historic Palestine, two generations of Palestinians have been born and raised under occupation. They have never known another – normal – life. Their memories are filled with images of hell. They see their tomorrows slipping out of their reach. And though it seems to them that everything outside this reality is heaven, yet they do not want to go to that heaven. They stay because they are afflicted with hope.
The Palestinian is a human being, a tormented human being who has daily questions, national and existential, who has a love story, who contemplates a flower and a window open to the unknown. Who has a metaphysical fear and an inner world utterly resistant to occupation.
"has daily questions, national, and existential" ya gimana gak mikirin ini sih? Mereka ini nggak dianggap ada. Mereka nggak dianggap manusia. Paspor mereka boleh punya, tapi untuk keluar dari sana? Mereka gabisa balik lagi.
Di PBB? Mereka ada tapi bukan sebagai negara. Mereka gak berhak untuk bersuara, apalagi ikut melakukan voting misal ada rapat gencatan senjata (sementara seluruh dunia termasuk penjajah BOLEH)
Mereka cuma dianggap sebagai pengungsi sehingga KALAU mereka ditembak mati, dunia gak bisa melakukan apa²
What else are we hiding when we hide Palestine?
You cannot reach either one without going through a border or a checkpoint controlled by Israel.
In Palestine, Israel is everywhere.
Literally everywhere. Mata uang, drone, perbatasan, nama kota yg diubah, tentara yang sewaktu-waktu datang yg entah itu untuk menembak atau menculik, dan mungkin ada banyak lagi yg belum aku tahu.
Termasuk mengaku sebagai seorang berdarah Palestina, kalo idf denger, dia akan dipanggil.
We can deal with them living here alongside us, they say, but they want to live here instead of us.
the centre of a world – now cut off from the world.
Every day Israel kills at least one Palestinian. Every day it arrests and detains and interrogates and demolishes.
Berdasarkan yg diberitakan jurnalis, selama 50 hari (sejak 7 Oktober), mereka menangkap sekitar 2000 orang (bahkan tepat setelah menukarkan penukar, besoknya mereka menangkap 150 anak-anak). Paling banyak dari Tepi Barat, dan tentu saja rata-rata usia di bawah umur.
Catatan dari Risalah Amar: Kenapa idf menangkap muslimin?
1. Dicurigai mendukung hamas
2. Salah seorang anggota Hamas yang mencurigakan
3. Untuk menakut-nakuti
Ada tambahan dari buku lain, ditulis oleh Refaat Alareer: idf menembak rakyat sipil untuk memberi 'pelajaran' kepada orang di sekitar orang tersebut (walau dia tidak melakukan apa²)
Di Gaza, Anda tidak tahu apa kesalahan Anda — Mosab Abu Toha
‘I had two choices: to become a martyr or to live.’
Martir = syuhada
Seorang penulis yg aku ikuti Instagramnya memosting potongan pengalamannya waktu pergi ke Palestina. Dia bertanya kepada gadis remaja kenapa nggak pindah negara saja? Negara lain mungkin lebih aman, tidak perlu merasakan perang seperti ini. Jawaban gadis itu:
"Tidak, kalau aku pindah negara, siapa yg menjaga Masjidil Aqsa? Jika saudara² muslim lainnya belum sanggup menjaga masjid suci ini, maka biarlah aku menjadi salah satu yg mewakili kalian. Do'a kalian atas perjuangan kami sudah lebih dari cukup untuk membuat kami terus bersemangat menjaga Masjidil Aqsa."
I’m almost ashamed to admit it: Palestinians are normal people – friendly, intelligent, rational people.
"I am almost ashamed to admit it" oh.. almost. Oh..............
More than a generation of West Bank Palestinians now exist who have never seen the sea.
Kamu belum merasa bersalah kah
They clearly could not exist without the active support of the Israeli state and military.
Orang gila.
YES THEY COULD, IF YOU AND THE OTHER CREATURES JUST GET THE FUK OUT FROM THEIR LAND.
I felt great anguish at the unnecessary suffering of the Palestinians
Narsis.
Playing victim.
After eight years of higher education in science and medicine, and nearly ten years in medical research, I left that career to become a storyteller, because someone stole my story and retold the truth of me as a lie.
I'M SORRY, ARE YOU ME?
These foreigners, with absolutely no identifiable ancestry in the land, believe it is their right to remove us and take our place. To erase us and make our heritage their own. To destroy our monuments, cemeteries and history. To live in my grandmother’s ancient home and pretend that the stories of those like Mohammad Khalil are their own. Because God chose them. Because God loves them more.
Gaza is the ‘enemy without’; unseen. It’s the biggest concentration camp in the world, where no one has any freedom of movement in or out of the country and unemployment approaches 50 per cent.
Fishermen tell me that gunboats decide if they have crossed the invisible border in the sea.
The market has been closed, the shops are closed, the roads are mostly closed to Palestinians, and on rooftops you can see Israeli soldiers with their guns pointing down at you.
an activist Jewish organisation makes a claim that the land on which the house was built was in Jewish hands before 1948. There is sometimes paperwork that supports this claim (there is a lot of citation of nineteenth-century Ottoman land law), and sometimes the paperwork is forged, but the court will hear and, through eccentric interpretations of these old laws, often agree to the claim. The violence this legality contains is precisely that no Israeli court will hear a corresponding claim from a Palestinian family.
Oh the propaganda
What did the local people who watched their village being torn up and reshaped according to this historical Jewish fantasy think about it all?
Many Israelis have contended that, in fact, there is no Palestinian people. It’s territory – rhetorical, ethical, religious, ethnic and geographic – so complexly, at times hideously contested that many people in the West, certainly in the US, simply look away.
THEY WILL ALWAYS BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU They will always be More beautiful Than you The people you are killing. You think it is hatred That you feel But it is really envy. You imagine if you destroy them We will forget How tall they stood How level Their gaze How straight their backs. How even the littlest ones Stood their little ground. Meanwhile You stand Hunched as a cobbler In your absurd Killer’s Gear Yelling Like a crazy person, Your face contorted Dripping sweat From what would be With or without Your lethal weapons A bullying brow And feral chin. Killing everyone but especially
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The only people who could walk freely were the settlers, who had four security guards to every person and strolled around with large dogs. One of them was filming us. When asked why, he replied, ‘I’m filming for God.’ When we asked, ‘What sort of God would permit this?’ he replied, ‘God wants me to photograph you so you can go to hell.’
Wkwkwk zionism is mental illness and it shows
‘Welcome to my country. You will be changed forever.’
Palestine is the soul of my soul now
The Israelis are destroying lives. But they are not destroying dreams. The fall of this disgraceful apartheid system is the only thing conceivable, because it must be.
Close-ups on the roads Palestinians can’t drive on but are certainly encouraged to die on,
Hebron—Sabrina Mahfouz
APOLOGY FOR BEING ALIVE I feared I wouldn’t be able to go back to my former life after the war ended, but I did. It felt so awkward. Everything was normal and people were acting as usual. How did I go back to my life, loaded with the guilt of being alive, of breathing? I apologise for being alive. I apologise to the son who asked his dad to bring him some chocolate, but he got neither chocolate nor his dad. I apologise to the boy who wanted to see the sky, but it was the last thing he saw. I apologise to the people who went to an UNRWA school believing it was safer, a haven, but it was their
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Israel destroyed water networks, universities, sewage pumping stations and over one hundred businesses,
The main fuel tank of the Gaza power plant lay in ruins, and lack of spare parts left 25 per cent of the population without power. Hospitals sank into darkness. Gazans could not locate their loved ones, and food and water grew scarce.
O Israel what are you doing to your children? Do you not see what they become?
This is where we heard the story of two young soccer players, Jawhar (nineteen) and Adam (seventeen), shot in the feet by Israeli soldiers because – because? They were going to play for Palestine in the World Cup.
We were surrounded by turrets and guns and razor-wire fences very like the Nazi death camps, and that is not the image Israel wants to project.
for Europeans the suffering of the Palestinians is seen as remote and disconnected from the notion of our history.
Palestine is being dismantled, turned into a jigsaw puzzle so complex that eventually it will be impossible to see the pieces for the lines between them.
it was about reconciling this life of privilege I had, where there was food on the table and clothes on my back, where I slept peacefully in my bed, with a world in which children just like me were starving and had no home to give them shelter. I resented being reminded of their existence.
the wall is not about security; it is, like so much else, about seizing land. You see that when you watch Israeli soldiers uprooting olive trees, cutting off farmers from their crops, from their water.
The wall also has a symbolic role. It tells Palestinians that they cannot even touch their own land, draw water from their wells.
Why is none of this alarming or familiar to the world? How can rational, intelligent, educated people look at this and feel it is justified.
One could argue that there are no ideologies today, only faith and sacrifice.
Once we let go of our belief in the greater good that holds mankind together we become prisoners of fear,
