A letter home

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010
Subject: Update #5: A letter home

I hope this letter finds you well.

A brief note: It has been brought to my attention that people were reluctant to forward or respond after news of the raids in February. Anything I send out is intended for as massive an audience as possible, and it’s really critical that people continue to do the great job that they have done of forwarding on. Similarly, I really appreciate hearing from people and your emails in no way endanger either of us.

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write a new update. To be entirely honest, things have been increasingly difficult and the thought of writing home has been too intimidating to even consider. This morning as I watched the sun rise over Sheikh Jarrah, I finally found a way of verbalizing what it is that’s been going on.

Events I reference: Bulldozer destruction near Bethlehem to build the apartheid wall: http://palsolidarity.org/2010/03/11629
The shooting of Ehab Bargouthi, age 14: http://palsolidarity.org/2010/03/11666
The destruction of Bidya’s natural spring: http://palsolidarity.org/2010/03/11679
The beating by riot police of five ISM activists (myself included) on Saturday night following a Sheikh Jarrah solidarity demonstration. We were standing on a sidewalk. This story hasn’t been published yet due to legal considerations; check the website in the next few days.

A Letter Home

There are moments where I just can’t take it in. Palestine—something tangible that you could hold in your hand—or more precisely, something slipping between your fingers before you can really know what it is you’re losing. Something beautiful. We are witnesses to more destruction than we will ever comprehend.

I watch the girls walking to school in their navy uniforms and I wonder how they fit into Israel’s 100 year plan.

I sit in the fig tree in Sheikh Jarrah and wonder if Saleh will be able to collect the fruit that ripens this autumn.

The al-Kurd house is in court tomorrow. When the petals fall from the roses blooming in the walkway, who will sweep them up?

Ehab’s chest rises and falls with the steady force of the ICU respirator. His olivey feet, scrubbed impossibly clean, reach beyond the wadded up sheets. Somehow they are perfect and human. A reminder of the entire person hidden behind the head swaddled in a manner reminiscent of playing “mummies” with rolls of toilet paper. Whether he will live or die is anyone’s guess. And I am told to approach his anguished mother with “Alhemdullileh, Allah salamtu”. Praise God. Thanks God everything is always ok.

On a live Rachel Corrie special for Tulkarem TV, I take a deep breath and promise the cameras that the American people are good. That we don’t know what we are doing and if we did, we would stop. In that moment and in every breath before and since, I am begging and pleading the gods I don’t believe in—please, somehow, could this be true. Would we stop? Can my home place, with its glacier-capped peaks and loamy farmland, ever understand the horror of bulldozers the size of two-car garages gently scooping ancient olive trees out of the pungent earth? Can my people ever see that they give $20 to Oxfam to rebuild the school their year-end taxes destroyed? No stack of Benjamins can reconstruct the children plucked from this god-forsaken holy land, each as fragile and loved as Ehab.

As the settler father leaves the house this morning, he carefully pushes his daughter’s stroller with one hand; closes the gate and then tugs his shirt over the pistol at his waist with the other. Who are those bullets for? The mother of five who sits in a plastic lawn chair across the street from her home? Her son, 20, who watches his father routinely arrested for refusing to allow his dignity to be swept away with last night’s bonfire ashes?

We can stand in the secluded basin, the sun beating down on the olive trees, but it’s too late to stop the five pale-legged Israelis dumping bag after bag of concrete into the village spring. The soldiers protecting the sun-hatted settlers make us close our cameras—it’s a Closed Military Zone. They stare, arms crossed, as I search their faces for an answer. Does any one of them truly believe that “security” justifies gratuitous vandalism? One dark-eyed boy is surely no older than I. If only he could know the hospitality which advises me, “You are welcome in your home”. If only he could hold sleeping five-year-old Samaa, her dark hair fanned out across the blankets, and wonder if she will live to see al-Aqsa. If only he could know that after the riot cops beat us Saturday night, someone produced a giant box of sandwiches. Would he ever again protect the destruction of something so simple and pure as a natural spring?

Palestine is slipping through our fingers. Every one of my International friends (family?) has dissolved in tears this week. Most of our friends in Sheikh Jarrah have been, or live in fear of, arrest for resisting the confiscation of their family homes. Four have been arrested in the past 36 hours.

I will never forget the feeling of being violently ripped from my friends, both Palestinian and International, as we were beaten to the ground that night. In a tangle of arms reaching for each other, being dragged by the hair as others’ heads were kicked like soccer balls, I realized I felt no concern for my own safety. The safety of the people I love; the communities we belong to; are frighteningly threatened. If there should be anything for little Samaa to grow up to; any figs for Saleh to collect this fall; any reason for Ehab to awaken from his coma; we must act in ways stronger than a few dollars carelessly tossed at erasing Israel’s destruction.

We must end systems that use bulldozers to smash swingsets in order to build walls of 25-foot-high concrete slabs. We must act to redirect your income from planting a bullet in Ehab’s skull. We must act because Palestine is slipping away, and there is no way to describe the beauty of an olive grove or a spring or a teenage boy. These are things that America destroys without knowing.

Shukran, Thanks

ISM reports: palsolidarity.org
What can you do? bdsmovement.net
Film showings are always a great idea. Occupation 101 and Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land are available at freedocumentaries.org

Every U.S. man, woman, and child, gives roughly $8/year for Israeli defense spending.
Every U.S. taxpayer gives roughly $18/year for Israeli defense spending.