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Okay.
"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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