Aside from the usual minor irritants such as a computer application suddenly quitting in the midst of some writing right before you hit the “save,” or losing shaving kits and wondering where a sock’s mate is, there’s the ever present, overriding ache of a military occupation that runs through ever facet of life in Occupied Palestine. Because if this, the anger that can build after going to a military base to see about getting a peace activist released, approaching a downtown Hebron checkpoint with some locals just trying to get across town or, say, trying to find video footage showing the tear gas canister blasting into a West Bank villager’s jaw yesterday, magnifies the bitchy little gripes that fester in each of our lives whether it’s in Michigan or Beit Sahour. There’s a kid with a bullet in his head who was doing nothing more than walking along a field near some soldiers: Fucking occupation. every West Bank town seems to have some of the dodgiest of septic systems and no way to afford updated utilities: Fucking occupation. Gridlock traffic: Fucking occupation.
The stupid little things we tend to work around in our every day lives are magnified here. In the U.S., you’ll see people throw a hissy fit for losing their wallet, but a few phone calls and canceled credit cards later, it’s no big deal. Be a Palestinian and lose your ID on the way to Nablus, and there’s a chance you’ll be hauled away for a week until the military decides who you are.
Lose your cell phone back home, and the worse thing that happens is that you’ll have to tell T-Mobile that those calls to Barcelona aren’t yours. Lose it here and there’s a chance that, if you’re a media coordinator for an human rights organization that’s been quasi-outlawed by the occupying government and you won’t know if you’re needed to contact lawyers for some arrested activist or whether anyone’s aware that a village is being bombarded with artillery or if you need to get on the horn to get some attention to a curfew launched in Kifl Haris because some Israeli settlers got their collective britches in a bunch over a few locals and some foreigners holding signs along an israeli-only road that cuts up acres of the village’s farmland. You won’t know if some family is being held hostage as a group of soldiers uses their home as a sniper outpost.
Keeping up with individual acts of brutality carried out on such a scale that round-the-clock oppression requires is like trying to keep a log of what kind of curtains each double-wide has as they all blow by in the middle of a tornado.
The steady stream of degradation and carnage becomes ubiquitous enough that no one outside, or many inside for that matter, pays attention to each little thing that erodes security for the Palestinian people. It lends to the idea, often among even those sympathetic to the Palestinian situation, that it may be sad, but that nothing much can be done for them, which really isn’t true. It’s more of a matter of what won’t be done. Sorry to leave that hanging for now, but we’ll get in a later post. Right now, it’s time to post more on the tornado.
Tags: life, PalestineBrowse Timeline
Related Entries
-
Red Scare tactics were such a success last time…...Keeping up...Racist fear-mongering wins in Olympia...in progress...Olympia guy’s book reviewed in the New York Review of Books...
Loading ...
Recently commented