Letters from Palestine
Letters from
Palestine
Lives,
Their Country, and the Power of
Nonviolence
Ghassan Abdullah
Smashwords Edition. Copyright 2010 Kenneth
Ring. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written
permission of the publisher.
Growing Up Palestinian
L
etters from Young
Palestinians
Apology Because We Love Life . . .
West Bank Stories
Birzeit St
ories: Entering the West
Bank
Letter from Muzna: Where Should I Deliver?
Life and Death in a Refug
ee Camp:
Dheisheh
Pales
tinians—The Eternal
Refugees
You Cannot Kill the Young Gazelle!
Nonviolent
Resistance and
Steadfastness
Letter from a Palestinian Seed
Letters from Gaza
My Life as an Eternal Stranger
Shades of Checkpoint Charlie at the Rafah
Crossing
The Night Bombs Rained Down on Gaza
Me, Myself and Palestine
My home is Ramallah, Palestine.
I am the camel that slowly walks on the dry,
hot desert sand,
With stored determination in my hump.
I am the ball of falafel,
Rough on the outside,
Soft within.
We are the olive and fruit trees,
Flourishing throughout the beauteous
landscape.
I come from the Holy Land,
The place Jesus was born.
I am one of the many strong-willed,
Educated, civilized people.
We were the ones who were
Deprived of our alphabet and numbers
Which are seen everywhere today.
Deprived of our land
Which spread over a vast area.
This area has now become a little sliver of
land
That stretches from the Gaza Strip to
Ramallah.
To understand me you have to know,
I’m not a terrorist.
I don’t have bombs.
None of those stereotypes are true.
My people, who have fought for their
country,
Are left to sit amongst the dirt and
rocks,
The only things left in the ruins of their
homes.
I come from what used to be a beautiful and
respected country,
But, sadly, it has become almost
forgotten.
My soul has felt the pain of all my
ancestors,
Knowing that their treasured land will never
be the same.
We used to be calm and gentle people,
But have turned furious and outraged
For what has become of our land.
Palestine isn’t just my home,
Palestine is me.
—Dominic Buoni, age 14
Foreword
I have spent the last four years touring the
United States, telling stories about life in occupied Palestine,
highlighting both the suffering and the resilience of the
Palestinian people living and dying under Israeli Apartheid. What
is most striking to me is the reality that I am invited to tell
Palestinians’ stories, yet Palestinians themselves are rarely
invited to tell their own stories. Or if they are invited,
audiences are less likely to show up to listen to them. More often
than not, Palestinian voices are dismissed as biased or
irrelevant.
Can you imagine during the Feminist movement
if women’s voices were dismissed as less credible than men’s
voices? Or if my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, were dismissed
in her talks as biased for not representing people on the
other
side
? Like all victims of persecution, Palestinians themselves
are the experts on their own plight and liberation struggle, and
their voices are the ones that most need to be heard.
When Jewish voices are privileged and
Palestinian voices dismissed, it reinforces the false and racist
notion that what’s important is what specifically Jews think,
whether or not it is right and just. Elevating the Jewish voices
even most critical of Israel may fulfill the short-term goal of
garnering support for Palestinian rights today, but it’s a setback
from the ultimate goal of living in a just and truly anti-racist
society. I spoke at a church in Kansas City once where the preacher
said it best to his Christian congregation: “If we cared half as
much about the voices of those oppressed in the Holy Land today as
we do about what Jewish Americans we know say and think of us and
this issue, we could truly follow in the footsteps of Jesus.”
As you’ll find in this book, Palestinians
are a diverse people like any other. Consequently, and particularly
in light of ongoing Palestinian factionalism, the task of following
the lead of Palestinians often seems easier said than done—what
voice can we look to as representative of the Palestinian people
and their struggle?
The difficulty of answering this question
has been partially resolved through an exciting development in the
movement for justice and equality in Palestine. In 2005, hundreds
of organizations representing all walks of Palestinian society
issued a unified call for supporters around the world to impose
Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with
international law and universal principles of human rights.
Hundreds of Palestinian NGOs, political parties, and refugee and
civil rights groups joined unions of women, farmers, teachers,
lawyers, doctors, dentists, professors, and more with a simple
demand: if people around the world cannot stop the billions of tax
dollars going from our government to Israel, at least we can stop
profiting from the oppression of Palestinians on an individual and
institutional level.
BDS is a Palestinian-led nonviolent movement
that has the potential to work, as evidenced by similar boycott
campaigns used to topple U.S. segregation and Apartheid in South
Africa, and by the incredible momentum it has already generated in
just a few years. As you get to know the hardships suffered by
Palestinians through the accounts in this book, remember that
Palestinians on the whole are not asking for our sympathy. Most
needed from supporters is the willingness to take action towards
real change.
The letters in this book will break your
heart and they will make you laugh. I am excited to invite others
to learn from them as I have. It is the creativity, strength, and
resilience of the Palestinian people—as evidenced in this book—that
strengthen me to continue to work for change. It is my hope that
these Palestinian voices will inspire you, as they have inspired
me, to believe that a peaceful and just future in Palestine is not
only essential, but indeed possible.
Anna Baltzer
December 7, 2009
Author,
Witness in Palestine
Filmmaker,
Life in Occupied
Palestine
www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com
Acknowledgments
Every book is of course a collaborative
enterprise, but in the case of this book, that was especially so.
To begin with, there could not have been any book at all without
the participation of all the individual contributors whose stories
make up this volume, so our first thanks must go to all of them who
were willing to share their narratives with us and, now, with
you.
In the case of this writer (K.R.), my
personal indebtedness begins with Dorothy Naor, who first
encouraged me to pursue this book and who put me in touch with the
man who became my coeditor in this enterprise, Ghassan Abdullah.
Dorothy also arranged for me to meet with Issa Souf, one of the
contributors to this book. Other people who also suggested or
helped me find contributors are Hannah Mermelstein; Anna Baltzer;
Mike Daly and Jacob Pace, both of Inter-Faith Peace Builders;
Haider Eid; Ramzy Baroud; Frank Barat; and Shireen Tawil.
Our thanks also go to Kathleen Christison,
Anna Baltzer, David Shulman, and Anna Rogers for their willingness
to read portions of the manuscript and point out various errors or
infelicities. Their comments did much to improve our book, but
whatever blemishes and gaffes that remain are our responsibility.
We are also grateful to Ellen Klemme for transcribing one of the
stories in this book from a tape that was made available to us, as
well as to Kay Plitt, who transcribed a talk by Daoud Nassar.
For their general encouragement and
assistance to us in various stages of this work, we would like to
thank Anna Rogers, David Shulman, Ramzy Baroud, Ali Abunimah, and,
most of all, Anna Baltzer, whose enthusiasm for the project was
always a source of inspiration for us and who was kind enough to
contribute the foreword to the book as well.
Introduction
Early in February 2008, I came into
possession of a book about the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinian people. Titled
Dark Hope
, it was written by an
American-born Israeli professor turned peace activist named David
Shulman. Although I had long been distressed over the seemingly
intractable nature of this conflict and dismayed by what I knew of
Israeli practices and politics in relation to the Palestinians,
this was the first book I had ever read on the subject. By the time
I finished it, it had changed my life completely.
Shulman, a man of about sixty, turned out to
be a distinguished professor of Indology (he is also a MacArthur
Fellow) on which subject he has authored many books. But
Dark
Hope
, of course, is a book of a very different kind than those
Shulman had written on the various areas of his own professional
expertise. In
Dark Hope
, he describes, in hauntingly
evocative prose, his work with an Israeli peace group called
Ta’ayush in the West Bank. In summary, he and his colleagues would
travel into the West Bank to help Palestinians with their
agricultural work—and to try to keep them from being attacked by
Israeli settlers who frequently harass, intimidate, and often
assault Palestinians as they try to go about their work in the
fields.
Shulman’s book begins with his forays into
the hills south of Hebron where many of the Palestinians who reside
there are actually cave dwellers and pastoralists who have lived
there for generations. However, this area is now an embattled zone
because of the presence of so-called settlements or outposts whose
inhabitants are Jews of the most strident ideological leanings,
many of whom are prone to violence. These settlers, who are
required to be armed, want the land the Palestinians occupy, and
they are at war with them in skirmishes that never seem to end. The
Palestinians, who are forbidden to use arms, are defenseless,
except for the intervention of peace activists, because the
soldiers and police in this area are there specifically to protect
and defend only the settlers.