She lived in a beautiful villa on the sea. She was friendly, passionate and generous, like most Palestinians. And proud of her hometown, like most Yafans. When Jewish refugees rolled in from war-torn Europe in the forties, Palestinians took them into their homes. Aisha took in a teenaged girl, gave her a room, and made her part of their family. In 1948, when Jewish terrorist gangs attacked Yafa and started to round up the people, killing and throwing them out of their homes, Aisha refused to leave her beloved home. But the Jewish girl who lived for years in her home put a gun to Aisha’s head and forced her out of the house. Aisha screamed, “What are you doing?! I gave you my home! I gave you my family! And this is what you do?!”

Aisha, her family, and hundreds of other Yafans walked until they reached the Jabaliya area in Gaza. She lost everything–her home, her identity, her dignity, and a beloved son who was killed in the fighting. Aisha, so full of heart, lost her sight from crying over his death.

She gained, however, the absolute adoration and undying love of a grandson who was born and raised in that corner of Jabaliya which was now a refugee camp. She gave him all she had–love and memories of a place called home. She told him every detail of Yafa. The names of the streets. The neighborhoods and houses. The trees. The mosques. Each smell and sound. It was the whole world to a boy who was born in a refugee camp.

Grandma Aisha was not the only one with these stories and Atef was not the only one who took them to heart. These memories and these stories are the only treasure and wealth of the refugee. They are the sole inheritance for the children of the dispossessed generation. Memories of what once was. Stories of what ought to have been.

“The old men in the refugee camp,” said Atef, recalling his childhood days, “in the evenings they would sit and talk about Jaffa.” And the children would gather round, listening with fascination as the grownups talked of the place they knew they were from, but had never seen.

“The refugee in Gaza,” said Atef trying to explain the significance and meaningfulness of the stories, “the refugee lives in his memories. In the old towns and villages. Even us, the sons and grandsons of that generation, we also live in this moment, this wishful moment.”

Grandma Aisha, her life and her stories, became his inspiration to write. He started at a young age and is now a published novelist and short story writer.

“One of my first dreams was to capture those moments she gave me and to retell them in writings,” he said, “because in her stories there is a kind of pain which you wouldn’t feel if you didn’t hear her telling it. And this is where literature matters.” To show what can‘t otherwise be conveyed.

“I want to remind my readers that these people don’t live in the refugee camps by their own choice. The refugee camp is not a place to love. It’s a curse…[In my writing] I have to be faithful, loyal to the people’s suffering. I want to make it clear that this is not a ‘national issue.’ It’s not about ‘the struggle.’ It’s a human issue.”

PARADISE LOST

“Like my grandmother, if I’d tell her something here [in Gaza] is beautiful. Immediately she would be like, ‘don’t tell me that, Jaffa is more beautiful!’ Or if I‘d compliment the sea, right away she would respond ‘this sea?! This is not a sea! You should see the sea in Jaffa!’ I mean, it’s the same sea,” Atef said laughing affectionately, “But in her mind, it was not the same sea. It was an entirely different world. If I’d tell her about a place here, immediately, ‘you should see the buildings in Jaffa! But I excuse you,’ she would say to me like I said something wrong, ‘I excuse you because you didn’t live there.’”

The loss of the refugees is as painful as it is irretrievable. The ever-present feeling of injustice is felt by the Palestinians, individually and collectively.

“But the Jaffans,” Atef said smiling wryly, “we feel that we were done an especially great injustice by being driven out of our homes. You have to understand,” he said facetiously, “we are very racist in Jaffa. We are very proud of our city. We are from the largest Palestinian city. We are urban people, not villagers. Before 1948 we had 20 newspapers. We had 12 sports clubs. We had a union for the railway workers. This was the 2nd Arab metropolitan city after Cairo. Many Arabs would immigrate there to work, especially from the Levant–Syria, Lebanon, Jordan.”

This was what they lost. The memory of the greatness of Yafa became the symbolic reminder for all Palestinians of what life ought to have been. “Jaffa means Palestine for us, the true Palestine. So in this sense Jaffa is something imagined, the lost Paradise.

“Even we [the children of the refugee camp] had this image of Jaffa as this Paradise, this lost Paradise. When you grew up in the refugee camp, with all this suffering, you believe strongly in this idea that if we lived in Jaffa this wouldn’t be happening. It’s a real feeling, not just for my grandmother, but for me and my generation.

“I grew up in a home of 80 meters–me, my father, my mother, my grandmother, my 10 brothers. Just three rooms. It was very crowded. And then you think, if the Nakba didn’t happen, we would be living in my grandfather’s villa on the coast of Jaffa,” he paused, “It’s owned by a Jew from Yemen now. Not owned,” he corrected himself, “but he lives in it.”

TO BE A REFUGEE

The refugee lives with the constantly reinforced feeling that he is illegitimate. From childhood he is taught that in the civilized, established world, the refugee has no place and, by default, no rights.

“I remember,” Atef said, “sitting in a geography class as a kid and the teacher saying that there are three kinds of places where people live: the city, the village, and the desert. So I asked, ‘what about the refugee camp?’ I didn’t understand why he didn’t mention the refugee camp. It was real for me and it was all I knew. The teacher responded saying that the refugee camp wasn’t really a place where people lived. It is temporary, he tried to explain. It doesn’t actually exist in normal urban or rural settings. It is something that happens for a moment, or was meant to happen for a moment, until the problem is resolved.”

There is little stability or sense of belonging in life as a refugee.

“We never think of the place as permanent, as ours. Take the architecture of the refugee camps, for example.” It is, in its form and function, incomplete. “You will make your flat very beautiful on the inside. But you won’t care about the outside. Because you don’t care. The place is the thing on the outside. And that place doesn’t belong to you.

A man will build a floor and the rooms he needs for the immediate present and no more. Even if he has money to build a complete house, he will not. He builds for necessity only. He does not build to establish himself. He does not build to make a home. He already has a home, but he is barred from it.

“Take my grandfather,” said Atef. “He refused to buy a piece of land outside the refugee camp in order to build a house, even though he had the money. Because he felt that this is all temporary. It’s not permanent. This refugee camp is temporary. ‘We are going to leave it,’ is the feeling, the hope of every refugee…Palestinians do not live in the today…We either live in a past that was beautiful or a future that would have been beautiful.”

Life becomes a conflict between holding on to the past and taking the reigns of the present. One’s immediate reality is temporary. What is permanent is a place imagined, a Neverland that cannot be.

VISITORS ONLY

Atef described this best with a story about his grandfather. It is a scene in his upcoming novel. After being kicked out in 1948, his grandfather refused to ever visit Yafa again. It would be too painful to see his hometown in the hands of the very people who threw him out. But in 1982, after 34 years of exile, suddenly he ached to set his eyes on his Yafa again. So they got in a car–Atef, his father, and his grandfather–and headed for Yafa. When the reached the town just before Yafa, Atef’s father pulled off the highway and turned onto a side road. This road would take them into the city. In just a few minutes they would be able to it from the road.

“Stop!” Grandpa Ibrahim said abruptly. He was crying. “Stop and drive back, Talal,” he told his son, the tears falling freely, “drive back.”

“He couldn’t see Jaffa again,“ Atef said softly, “he wanted to keep Jaffa as he left it in 1948.”

The old man died without ever seeing his home again. But he died with a pristine memory of how it was, when it was his. That is the strength of the permanency the refugee feels and its unspoken pain. It is passed down to and relived by those who never had the privilege of being born and raised there.

Atef described how, when he visits Jaffa now, he feels the great urge to mentally edit the reality he sees before him with the descriptions Grandma Aisha gave him. With her eyes he imagines the Old Jaffa, “with the same streets, the same buildings, the same architecture… You want to rebuild the city [in your mind], to recapture the old place. So you don’t live in reality even when you see it before you. This is where your life is a kind of metaphor. Our lives are a kind of metaphor.”

The metaphor gives the refugee a kernel of hope. It is a protective cloak that shields away some of the painful reality, that veils part of the humiliating knowledge of one’s status, that covers a little of the irrevocable sense of loss. Visiting a hometown, for a refugee, is like a catharsis without the relief.

“You visit, you don’t return,” said Atef, “I’ve been to Jaffa a few times. The last time I went was in 1998. It was the 50th anniversary of the Nakba. I went for a couple of days and stayed with some relatives that are still there. I cried–mostly for my grandmother. I imagined her walking in Jaffa again…It’s this beautiful villa,” he said, talking of his grandparent’s house, “a very nice house on the sea. Seeing my family’s house was very sad.

“I wrote about it in one of my novels. There is this scene with a dialogue between this Israeli girl and a Palestinian guy. It’s this encounter between the two characters. She tells him, You live in the past. Lets live in the present. The Palestinian responds, telling her But your present is my past. You live in Tel Aviv now. I was supposed to be born in a villa by the sea. But I was born in a refugee camp.

“I was supposed to be born in a villa by the sea,” he said again, talking of himself this time. “But I was born in a refugee camp. A place where you can hear your neighbor snoring while you sleep.”

He, like every Palestinian, is each day made newly aware of the crushing knowledge that “a stranger came and changed the natural course of my life.”

“And you don’t have hope,” he ended. “The people now wish they could fly over Gaza and leave. Unfortunately, of course. It is the opposite image of the Palestinian returning to his country. But it’s true. Because life is pushing them. And they have such a hard time. When you lose hope you lose the ability to continue.”

Later that day, I sat brooding as I looked out on the grey Gazan sea and watched the gulls soar majestically overhead, as if they owned the world and had not a care in their hearts. Hope is the thing with feathers, I thought, recalling the first line of Emily Dickinson‘s poem. Hope, the elusive metaphor of the Palestinians. A metaphor they daily renew, only for it to be perpetually broken.

Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The waves crashed loudly against the shore. Yes, I thought, sore, indeed, must be their storm.

“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gazan street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces, “it couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”

His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced, “the day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”

By 1991 the first Intifada (Palestinian Uprising) was coming to an end. The streets of Gaza slowly emptied of the Israeli soldiers and tanks. The bodies of martyred Palestinians were less often carried to neighborhood graveyards. And in Beit Hanoun, a northern town of Gaza, six-year-old Ahmad began his first day of school.

He enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. Life, one could say, was becoming rather normal in Gaza. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.

He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a whole knew world in that beautiful state of Maine. A world that told him life was open and free and full of opportunity. So he returned to Gaza, after this month-long excursion, full of hope.

But Ahmad was branded a Palestinian at birth. He would now learn to pay that price. The second Intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from America, at the start of his first year of high school.

“The week before the Intifada started we were in Jerusalem, in Al-Aqsa Mosque. We were praying,” he said, recalling how close he was to being caught amid the initial Jerusalem massacre. The Israeli onslaught quickly spread throughout all the West Bank and Gaza, leaving no Palestinian in peace.

“There was no space,” he told me, trying to explain how the Israeli offensive effected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.

It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad‘s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.

“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs… No school. Just demonstrations… You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”

Still, despite all the madness, or perhaps in spite of it all, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.

Why?
Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.
Why?
Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.
Why?
Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.

It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones that were not killed) came to their 3rd and final year of high school in 2003. Called Tawjihi, the entire future educational and career life of the student hinges on these end-of-the-year cumulative exams.

“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”

Tawjihi year began normal enough. Normal in the Palestinian sense of the word. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.

“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “nothing. You cannot study and people are dying,” he explained, as if that needed explaining to me, a girl who had never once even seen a dead body.

And all the while their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was the 9th of June 2003. And the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.

“What do we do?” said Ahmad, “we need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”

So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Everyday the students went. And everyday the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.

It was the worst month, Ahmad told me. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.

The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.

“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”

So that was his high school story. I asked how he felt during those years, as I was unable to comprehend how one could live through such a horror and move on.

“It’s mixed feelings,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t know what you are doing or what’s going on around you. Sometimes it’s fear because you are afraid to lose more friends and more people. And because you are afraid about your family. And you are afraid about your future.

“You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.

“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, everyday there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”

“I started to believe that maybe the power of this education that I will have in the future will be more than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.

“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything: [None of that matters because] I believe that its my right and I have to do it.”

That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.

“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.

“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.

“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me ‘you just need to give up now.’ And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.

“Because this became the normal life for us. The abnormal life for other people became the normal life for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.

“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more chance to get what they want? We need also to continue.”

He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy, “How difficult it was,” he said softly.

But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his BA in information technology at a university in Gaza.

“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the Intifada but the troubles increased in university,” Ahmad explained, “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usual attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed 4 or 5 times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.

“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home, it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”

Many times he was even able to attend final exams.

“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when time for exams come, attacks happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives are killed, [so I‘d miss the exams]. I was supposed graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”

Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008. But he was reminded once again that a Palestinian who dared pursue a good life had heavy taxes to pay.

“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, searching for words to describe the deep personal affront he felt, “it was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You wont graduate. Just keep waiting for death.’ ”

His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.

“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. 23 months. 23 years. 23 centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot remember words to describe it.”

But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not, I cannot help but acknowledge, not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.

“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”

For it was like home in so many ways, with its farms and fields, quiet streets and lush greenery all round. And its people, like the folk in my own town, were very proud of their quiet corner and were deeply attached to Nature and the special solace it gave. In fact, it was there that I learned the hadeeth of the Prophet: “three things in life are a cooling to the eyes: greenery, running water, and a beautiful face.”

But as I sat beneath the grapevines eating fresh fruit and the best stuffed grape leaves I’ve ever eaten, I learned how the calming, home-like green all around me held stories my rural southwestern Wisconsin never told.

Abu Wael, our white-haired host, so gentle and soft-spoken, sat with us and graciously urged us to eat more of this food he grew with his own hands. And he told us a little of his grief. And I learned more later from his son Ahmad.

I could tell from his speech (and from what his son told me) that he felt more connected to his farm than to anything else in life. The kind of person who hates to be separated from it even for a day. And so he goes there, even though he is old and even though he does not have the same strength he used to have. Because he has to go. Because that is when he feels most alive, most happy.

It was not mere sentiment only, of course. He was a father of seven. A father determined to see his children through college. A father determined to see them well-educated and well-placed in life. And the farm was main source of provision.

It used to be planted with olive trees, and a beautiful orchard it was. But then came October 2004. And it was time to collect the olives. So he went, himself, some workers, and relatives, to begin the harvest. But they never did harvest those olives that year. For Beit Hanoun was under attack by the Israeli army. And that day, as they reached the farm, they received news that a cousin, Lu’ay, was hit by a helicopter rocket and mortally wounded. So they left the farm in concern for Lu’ay and the family.

The third day after the attack, with Lu’ay dying in the hospital and nothing else to be done, Abu Wael returned with the workers and relatives to harvest the trees. When they reached the farm, however, they were met by Israeli bulldozers who began to chase them. So they tried to escape and fled the fields. And that’s when they bulldozed the land, crushing beneath their machines and metal blades the trees and their just-ripened olives.

It was the 7th of October that day. And that day too Lu’ay passed away. And Abu Wael fell ill, because of the land and because of Lu‘ay. But that would not be the last of his grief that year.

Three days later, on the 10th of October, he and his son stood on their balcony. It was 5am. An attack had just happened and they were trying to figure out what had happened. Another cousin (also named Ahmad) decided to go the hospital to see what was going on. Ahmad was in the street, only 15 meters away from Abu Wael’s house, when he was hit by an apache helicopter rocket.

Abu Wael’s own son Ahmad went down running and found his cousin badly injured and also wounded in the leg, so he carried him and took him to the hospital. But there was no chance. He was dead that same day.

It was 15 days of attack in Beit Hanoun. Five people were killed. Each three days a new martyr. And the green all round crushed into rubble and dirt. It was a terrible time. A time without hope. Each day enfolded something worse than the last. And Abu Wael did not recover from his illness for two months.

But the beginning of 2005 brought a new year and new determination. He came back to plant his fields. Because he couldn’t stay away. He planted the farm with orange trees. It was hard work. First they had to clear the farm of the rubble of the last destruction and build a new irrigation system.

But that land seems to have its own blessing. I’ve witnessed it myself. And within six months the trees were growing and growing fast.

But then came the tanks once again. And they bulldozed the orchards once again. And they banished the green once again.

But Abu Wael never gave up. He fought for his land once again. He fought back with each seed he planted that next year. In 2006 he planted watermelon. And he cared for the plants and they grew well. It was time for harvest again.

But no harvest. Over the infamous border came the bulldozers and they destroyed in a few violent moments what took so much tenderness and time to grow.

So it was that each visit of the tanks brought a loss of money and time and work, as well as sickness and more heartbreak for Abu Wael

But still he worked. And in 2008 he planted his land with many types of vegetables. This time the Israeli tanks bulldozed the farm a few weeks before harvest.

And they never stopped. For during the 2009 Massacre of Gaza they destroyed his land again. It was planted with cabbage and other vegetables. They destroyed the whole land as well as the water motor. So now the farm is nothing. They cannot plant because there is no water to plant with.

That’s how it is in Beit Hanoun. The farmers sow the seeds of wholesome provision–for themselves and their families and their people. And the Israeli tanks destroy it. So the farmers come back to plant. And the tanks come back to destroy it again. And the farmers come back to plant.

And they’ll always come back to plant.

That is why Abu Wael plans now to go to his municipality and ask for some irrigation equipment. For some trees still stand in his devastated farm. And he needs to bring them water. Even though he’s tired and even though he’s sick. Its his way to fight and his way to survive.

So that’s why Beit Hanoun is different from my town. Because Beit Hanoun’s green is cruelly razed every year. And now as I walk through my beautiful and peaceful town, I wonder what we would do if our own green was so violently snatched away from us, this cooling to our eyes.

Nestled in the north of Gaza, close to the Israeli border, Hay As-salaam (Peace Neighborhood) was in nature as in name: A quiet area outside the city. The land owned by a wealthy Palestinian (extended) family, the Abu Eida family. Their 10 family houses gave life to the neighborhood. All were new and large and beautiful, the oldest only built in the early 2000‘s.

Surrounding these beautiful villas were about 400,000 square meters of farm and orchards. Lambs grazed the land. Chickens pecked the ground. Throngs of varied trees stood tall all round: nuts and palms, citrus and orange–some over a hundred years old. Just down the lane were the family factories. These concrete mixing factories included the first and oldest ones in the Gaza Strip.

Situated as it was, on the border, Peace Neighborhood was one of the first places the Israeli army occupied during the December-January Massacre of 2009. Until that point of the Massacre, the families stayed in their homes, afraid to leave–as all in Gaza were.

On the 12th of January, Jihad Abu Eida received a phone call from his brother, telling him that the Israelis would let them leave their houses if they held up the white flag. So Jihad collected his wife and six young children and they left carried nothing with them but the clothes on their back and, naturally, the white flag.

They waited out the next week of terror, away from home and anxious to return. When the day of relief finally arrived, Jihad once again gathered up his family, this time with uplifted spirits, for they were headed home.

But home was never to be found again.

They returned to a graveyard. The entire land all around, as far as the eye could see, lay flattened. It was as if a giant plow came through and raked everything through.

“This was my home,” Jihad tells me as we stand in front of a heap of rubble. I look around, trying to detect some of the beauty he described. I see nothing. Just destruction. Not one tree still stands. There are heaps of rubble that used to be houses. Only the elevator shafts still stand in some.

One house stands, however. It is quite a handsome house. Or rather I can tell it used to be handsome, despite the broken brick walls and bullet holes, despite the broken pillars and crumbling balcony.

“The Israelis used it as a command post,” Jihad explains. That is why it remained standing. They were considerate enough, however, to leave their mark before they departed. The walls on the inside of the house are covered with maps of the area. They are also trashed with swear words and vulgarities. It was ransacked and looted of all valuables.

“They took all our gold and money and valuables before they bombed them,” Jihad explains as we walk around his “house.” Jihad picks out a bent and torn text book.

“That was one of my engineering books,” he says, fingering it delicately. And I wonder vaguely at the horrible misconception people back home have of the people here whose lives our money has destroyed.

Jihad studied engineering in San Diego, CA in the late 80‘s and 90‘s. He is an avid Lakers fan until now (he is still rooting for them to win now!). And he even named his oldest son Kareem after Karim Abdul Jabbar. This is the kind of person who American media vilifies.

“That was my driveway,” Jihad says as we walk on some rubble. I see bits of beautiful tile among the debris. A little way off I spot chunks of engraved columns.

“We have nothing left. Not one photo. Not my diplomas. Nothing. Everything is gone,” he says as we walk slowly among the destruction,

“That was my uncle’s house,” he points to another mount of rubble.

“Remember,” says a friend who is with him, “remember when we had breakfast their that time?” They laugh at the personal memory. I smile weakly, wondering at the their ability to still laugh amid the ruin.

Our media gets worse and worse by the minute here in Gaza. What sort of military “defense” bombs, with F-16, residential homes? Do people who supposedly fear for their safety occupy a house, loot it, desecrate its wall and shell it with tanks when done? Do they shoot and kill the harmless livestock and chickens? Do they uproot hundred-year-old trees? (Environmentalists, do you care?)

I watch in numb disbelief as Jihad tells me of that dreadful day they returned. This middle aged man’s voice shakes with grief. He was overcome with shock when he saw the place. They, none of them, could believe it. It was absolutely devastating. He thought he was going to have a heart attack from the horror. And all the family there with him. It was awful, he kept saying.

He never thought they would destroy the place at all, let alone destroy everything so completely. Because they are on the border, Jihad explains, the Israelis came to their place three or four times before in the past few years. Just last year they came and forced his family to stay in one room while they used the rest of the house.

“When they left, the only thing they destroyed were the fences,” he says. This time, he thought, it would be like that. But he was wrong. The destruction was total. The family lost everything. For the Israelis not only destroyed their places of residence and farms and orchards and animals, but also all their factories.

Jihad told me the estimate of their loss is 15 million dollars. That, I am sure, is an extremely conservative estimate. He said others are saying it is over 20 million and I think that is closer to the mark. But he holds 15 million, for he knows that for sure it is that much that is lost.

“It’s the tax we pay for being Palestinian,” he says. A heavy tax, indeed.

“We are fine with them are our neighbors,” he told me when I asked about the Israelis, “let us live together! But they don’t want us as neighbors. They are trying to drive us out. They want the land and not the people.”

When I asked him if this terrible loss made him want to leave Gaza. He just looked at me and stated simply, “Gaza is the only place for me. I have no other place.”

We visited one of the factories. Heaps of rubble and metal are scattered around. Jihad said it is much cleaner now than it was. They are trying to rebuild. But it is a slow process because of the siege. I asked him why they are rebuilding after this absolute loss.

“We must rebuild,” he said, “and if they come and destroy again. We must rebuild. We cannot just sit and cry and think about the past. We must look to the future.”

After touring the destruction of the once-upon-a-greener-time factory, we sit with his father and brothers and nephews and have tea. The talk is light and happy. I don’t understand how it could be so, with the signs of their grief all around. But they are a strong people, and inclined toward optimism. So we drink and talk and laugh.

As we get up to leave the “factory” and go back home, Jihad shakes hands with his father. When we get into the car and head out, he remarks on his parting.

“You see how I shook hands with my father just now to go home?” he asks. “I never had to do that before. We lived in the same house. But now he lives here and I live in middle of the crowded city. In a small, rented flat.”

The desolate land goes by in a blur. It wasn’t just the loss of property, and fortune, and future, I think to myself. They ripped the family asunder.

What is the excuse, I ponder now in the silence of a Gazan night, what is the excuse for a people who destroyed that place called peace?

The children of Gaza draw that way too. But their paintings hold what no child’s artwork should ever show.

We sat, I and a group from the Code Pink delegation come to Gaza, in a conference room of the Al-Qattan Center in Gaza. The center focuses on literacy and culture specifically for children under the age of 15. It has a beautiful public library and over 13,000 members.

In that room we were shown a truly shocking set (what ought to become an exhibit at every art museum in America) of children’s paintings after the most recent Israeli massacre of Palestinian people in Gaza.

The paintings tell an honest story of the absolute savagery of the Israeli occupation, siege and continual destruction of Gaza. Their oh-so-child-like brushstrokes of bombed out buildings. A red and all too disproportionate stick figure lies in front of a house. He lies in a pool of blood. A black outlined cloud on another painting has red strokes of fire issuing from it–a far too accurate depiction of white phosphorous. Tanks. Blood. Chaos. Dead people scattered. Madness. Bombs. Broken buildings. Terror.

It is disturbing enough to see paintings of such violence from anyone. But that one can tell with a moments glance these are indeed the creations of children makes the viewer jolt with horror and revulsion. No child should ever even know such images, let alone paint them with such intimacy and deliberate, eye-witness conviction.

Those paintings were, somehow, worse for me to digest than even seeing first hand the rubble of far too many buildings to keep count of. It hit me far harder than feeling my feet crunch over the shattered glass of a newly built hospital building never given a chance to be used.

The graphic paintings show the world (if the world ever sees them) with a child’s simplicity that what is happening in Gaza is not just a political problem. It is not about getting bad guys or terrorists or defending Israel–or any other media-driven propaganda.

The paintings tell us that we are destroying the human identity of individuals. Ripping violently from them all that makes people “normal” and decent. What kind of universe do these children see? Their entire psychology has been tortured into an unrecognizable nightmare. Our American taxpayer money did not just destroy the homes, schools, and mosques of these people. The Israeli armed forces did not just scare them with our weapons. Nor did they merely kill and maim them. The Unites States and Israel, and the world in its tacit complicity, has collectively ravaged the consciousness of an entire population. And I wonder, after seeing those paintings, how it can ever be healed.

Good art is supposed to be provocative. Yesterday afternoon I saw what Picasso could never create. Guernica painted with the hands and hearts of children. The bright, unmixed colors a shinning testament to their innocence.

   By a lonely prison wall
   I heard a young girl calling,
   ”Michael, they are taking you away
   For you stole Trevelyn’s corn,
   So the young might see the morn.
   Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.”

The young man’s response pierces, unexpectedly, the hearts of listeners:

   By a lonely prison wall
   I heard a young man calling,
   ”Nothing matters, Mary, when you’re free
   Against the Famine and the Crown,
   I rebelled, they cut me down.
   Now you must raise our child with dignity.”

The song ends with the young man being ripped forever away from his family, to face a life of slavery in the British prison colonies in Botany Bay, Australia. Mary watches him go, helpless, hoping for the impossible—that she might see her love again.

   By a lonely harbor wall
   She watched the last star falling
   As that prison ship sailed out against the sky
   Sure she’ll wait and hope and pray
   For her love in Botany Bay
   It’s so lonely round the Fields of Athenry.

A little background might fully paint the picture for you: The Great Hunger is commonly blamed on the potato blight that spread across Europe in the mid-1800′s. Before the blight hit, the condition of the Irish people was already bleak. By that time, the English had occupied most of the fertile land of Ireland. The Empire installed settlers, wealthy English landowners, who now reaped the rewards of the stolen land. The Irish were forced to work on these plantations—land which was once theirs and their fathers—as serfs (in actuality slaves would be a more accurate description—the Irish received almost nothing for their grueling work, were not allow to get an education, and often ended up paying their landowners to work). This state of affairs left the Irish in abject poverty, nearly a third of the population unable to find food or money enough to feed their families.

And then the blight began spreading across Europe in the 1840′s. England had ample enough time to counterbalance the infestation and thereby prevent any significant hardship for its colony in Ireland. Needless to say, England staunchly refused to help. Instead, like any good conqueror, they utilized this opportunity to the full—for, in English eyes, the blight was a blessing.

Travelyan, the landlord referred to in the song (he was also the Secretary of the Treasury for Irish Relief) said of the Famine that it was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful providence” and “an opportunity to clear the land of surplus population.” To give an idea of the extent of the racism toward the Irish, the Prime Minister Lord John Russell, was an adherent of the renowned 16th century English poet Edmund Spenser’s views on Ireland. Spenser had written a genocidal pamphlet on how to deal with the “Irish problem.” In it, he recommends ways in which to cause famine and calculates “how far English colonization and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation.”

The educational institutions of England propagated this bigotry on a popular level. One such Oxford professor of economics at the time lamented that the Famine “would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.”

We must allow this professor to be an excellent economist at least, for his estimate was nearly accurate. The Famine killed between 1.1 and 1.5 million Irish people. Over another million Irish were forced to flee to America, never to see their homes or families again. By the end of the five years of famine, the Irish lost over 25% of their population. 150 years later their population is only half of what it was before the Famine.

Over and above the 2.5 million deaths and departures, the Famine laid the groundwork for even more English repression of the Irish. Their increasing impoverishment during this time made it impossible for many to pay their rent. This gave an excuse to their English landowners to push them off their land (as if it were not enough that they were forced to work their land like slaves). The number is unknown, but hundreds of thousands of Irish were evicted, forced to flee to the barren tracts in the west of the country.

They destroyed the Irish language. Before the Famine the majority of the Irish spoke Irish (or Gaelic). After the famine—their culture broken, their history shattered, their future departing before their eyes across the sea, never to be seen again—Gaelic began waning and English became the number one language of the island. It still is today.

Starvation as Genocide

The Famine was, undoubtedly, a watershed event in Ireland’s tragic history. The political pretext of the Famine may have been the potato blight that spread across Europe. But nowhere else in Europe did starvation occur. An Irish political writer at the time, John Mitchel, said notably that “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”

That the Famine was really genocide has been (and continues to be) a hot political issue. But in cases like these, thankfully, history speaks for itself. Without a doubt, England could have prevented the famine completely. While potato was a main food for many of the Irish (being too poor and not having enough land to grow anything else), Ireland continued to harvest much grain and other food sources throughout the Famine—it is not called the Emerald Island for nothing—all of which was being exported to England by the settlers for a profit. Historian Cecil Woodham-Smith has said that it is an “indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation.”

The horror and violence of starvation as a means of genocide is recorded in the descriptions of the emaciated bodies of babies. English Quaker William Bennett recalled the scene of “three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs…perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stages of actual starvation.”

Law professor Francis Boyle (Urbana-Champaign) has said that “the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnic, and racial group commonly known as the Irish people.” This, he said, constitutes an act of genocide.
Repetition in the Holy Land

Humankind has not changed much in the past 150 years or so. Genocidal starvation seems to be a favorite political tool for heartless oppressors, people infected with malignant arrogance. For nearly two years now, the Zionist Israeli government has been starving out the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza. It has set up a blockade against the area of Gaza, allowing nothing in and nothing out—an open-air concentration camp. Gaza is the most populous place on earth, and one of the most impoverished. Throughout the blockade, life saving medicine, food, gas and other necessities have been severely limited.

And then on November 5th the Israelis sealed off the borders completely, pushing Gazans to the brink of disaster. Banks collapsed, further dragging Gazans into poverty. Nearly 50% of Gazans at the time were unemployed and workers had not been paid since the 19th of November.

Richard Falk, a UN representative for human rights in occupied Palestinian territory has called this blockade of Gaza a crime against humanity. Falk was arrested upon landing in Tel Aviv in the third week of December. He was kept in a disgusting, crowded cell over night before being deported to his native California. He has reported, however, that about 46% of Gazan children suffer from acute anemia and 18% have stunted growth. 75% of all Gazans suffer from some degree of malnutrition.

The vast majority of Gazans depend on charity food providers, but because of the blockade the charities were forced to suspend their food distribution in mid December, only sporadically being opened after that. The vast majority of bakeries in Gaza have also shut down because they ran out of cooking gas. The lack of cooking gas has made it impossible for the people to raise chickens (the gas is needed to incubate the chicks), depriving the Gazans of their prime source of protein. Water is also short, many Gazans during this time had access to water for only six hours every three days.

They also were deprived of fuel to run the pumps for sewage systems and power for electricity. They spent at least three quarters of their day with no electricity. The effects of this were catastrophic—people could not cook, kids could not go to school, and hospitals were running out of fuel to run their generators. Because of the frequent power outages much of the medical equipment has been destroyed. And because of the blockade, medicine is scarce and, as most of the exit visas for Gazans have been revoked by the Israelis, people who needed outside medical help simply could not get it. 230 people died last year because of this, many at checkpoints waiting to cross.

The psychological and emotional scarring of this sort of violence against a population cannot be stressed enough. Over 50% of Gazan children under the age of 12 do not have the will to live. And a shocking 71% of kids interviewed said they want to be martyrs.

The Massacre

All this was before the 27th of December. That Saturday morning, just as kids left school to go home for their morning recess, the bombs started dropping. Panic spread through the streets of Gaza. By the end of that day over 200 people were killed and over 700 were injured (many critically). Within minutes hundreds of wounded people flooded hospitals—hospitals that already suffered from lack of proper equipment and medicine.

As I write, the third week of bombing is nearly over. Day twenty of the massacre has begun. Tanks pound to death unarmed Palestinians in the streets. Reservist soldiers shoot to kill during the dark nights. The skyline of Gaza, as I watch the news, looks like a scene of Hellfire. The deep night sky is lit up with shockingly massive bursts of flame, sparks flying everywhere, fireballs explode, and smoke shoots up like columns. The noise of drones overhead never ceases.

The Israelis ignore the UN call for a ceasefire and prepare for “phase three,” the letting loose of ground troops onto the shattered and blood-filled streets of Gaza. 13 Israelis have been killed (four by friendly fire). The Israelis have slaughtered more than 1,030 Palestinians (not including people yet to be found under rubble). They have injured more than 4,750. Forty-some percent of the deaths (according to the UN) are women and children. All are innocent—prisoners of the Israeli-run Gaza concentration camp. Each single death is a murder. Entire families have been killed in their beds, 2-ton bombs dropping on their houses as the sleep. Trapped children suck the toes of their dead mothers as they wait for days to be rescued.

At least 21 medics, clearly marked, have been shot and killed by Israelis. Ambulances have also been targeted. Because of the barbarous “security measures” taken by the Israelis, medics are prevented from going into many areas. In other areas they are not allowed to drive in, so they walk miles just to retrieve some of the dead and wounded. Israeli snipers have shot medics as they rush to retrieve dead bodies.

Nowhere is safe at all. Frightened people fled for refuge to UN schools. In cold blood, knowing the coordinates of the schools, the Israelis bombed two such schools last week. They killed three people in the first school. In the second, blood ran down the steps and across the courtyard as panicked and grieved people struggled to get the 43 dead bodies to the hospital.

It’s a truly horrific sight, watching the footage of Gaza, so close and yet so far away. Countless fathers weep over their still and bloodied daughters. Women raise their hands in the air, crying out for help from somewhere, anywhere. Somber young men sit on bits of rubble, amid debris that was once called home. Young girls cry in the streets, terror etched in their otherwise pretty faces.

One father asks, holding up his dead baby, a bullet in its head, “what did this child do to [Ehud] Barak? Did he throw anything at him?” He then asked, “what did these children do to Barak?” indicating two little boys with bullet holes in their chests, killed by Israeli snipers, “you did all this for the election, is this the way you treat children?”

The hospitals bear witness to the savage barbarity of the Israeli genocide. Infants covered with shrapnel scream as doctors try to hold them down and work on them with no anesthesia. Little boys lay, oddly still, but eyes wide with fright, tubes pushed through their nose and mouth. Ambulances, minivans, and cars rush—one after another—to the doors of the hospitals, young men jump out to drag out the bodies—some wounded, others dead. It’s mayhem. A young man here sobs like a child as he sees his bloodied friend die at the entrance to the hospital. A woman, hysterical, slaps her face repeatedly, wailing and shrieking as the medics tell her that her children are dead. And grown men rock themselves with grief, howling at the death of their mothers, their wives, and their babies.

People around them—their voices raw with emotion, their bodies shaking with rage and pity—try in turns to drag the mourners off the bodies of the dead, hold them up, and counsel them: say the shahada, “I bear witness that there is no god but God and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Shouts of the shahada echo through the pandemonium-filled hospital halls.

Every day in the past twenty days, an hour or so before dawn, the noise of the bombs exploding and the roaring of the planes overhead slightly hushed by the beautiful, melodious calls to prayer coming forth from the numerous mosques of Gaza. Over a dozen mosques have been blown to pieces. The people still pray in the rubble though. “If the Israelis want to deny it for us, we’ll worship despite the bombings,” said one Gazan. “God only strengthens our convictions after these attacks,” says another.” An imam said after the Friday prayer: “To the people around the world and in Arab and Muslim countries, I say your silence allows for this aggression to continue. And to those praying here, I say this is our mosque and I will pray here till Judgment Day. And we will rebuild this mosque even bigger.”

And throughout all this, the starvation continues. There is still barely any food. And even if there was, many fear leaving their houses to go out and scrounge for it. Still others venture out to find some. They risk their lives to feed their families. Yet others have no money to even risk their lives to buy food. And some who do have money cannot buy anything, for bakeries are shut or empty. Electricity is still out most of the time. So too is the water. And of that precious water, much of it is used to put out the fire created by the explosions (including the incendiary white phosphorus which is illegal to use on civilian populations as it is extremely flammable and very toxic).

The emaciated bodies of those yet living bear witness to this human catastrophe. Hell on earth, a UN aid worker called it. The UN aid ceased their programs for a couple days as the Israelis have repeatedly targeted (and killed) their workers (who are clearly marked).

I’ve seen women sobbing in shelters, demanding “what have our kids done?!” They hold their hungry, screaming babies—no more milk to feed them, “where is the world?!” they demand. “Is the world blinded?!” shouts an old man. “Why can’t we go home to our beds and eat and drink like everybody else?!” It’s heartbreaking to see these individuals driven mad by the terror and hunger this way. Some try to reason with the mindless violence, they scream in absolute desperation: “we have no Hamas here! There is not Hamas here!” some old women shout from their windows. They look as if they are on the brink of total mental and emotional derangement.

And yet, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, has said, and everyone should note, that “the humanitarian situation in Gaza is exactly as it should be.” Just another indication of the harder than stone hearts of these butchers.

The Plan of Attack

Perhaps all this would be easier to stomach were this holocaust done on a vengeful whim. But the indigestible reality is that this was meticulously planned out for at least half a year. It was internationally coordinated as well. If you do not believe my loaded accusation then look at the facts yourself.

The Israelis, along with their cohorts in the US, the EU, and the Arab world, had their plan of attack worked out to the tee. Their extremely lame pretext ran something like this: We needed to attack Gaza because Hamas has been firing rockets into our city. Hamas broke the ceasefire in this way, so we were forced to attack.

This statement is a bald-faced lie. Hamas was very cooperative with the Israelis. They abided by the ceasefire even while the Israelis never lived up to their side of the agreement. The Israelis laid siege to Gaza breaking the ceasefire and Hamas still did not react. The Israeli soldiers killed several Palestinians breaking the ceasefire and Hamas still did not react. Israel then killed six people on the 4th of November breaking the ceasefire yet again. Only then did Hamas retaliate with rockets.

This reality has been convoluted and contorted by the Israelis and the US. Israeli Tzipi Livni, said, hours before the attack that “Hamas needs to understand that our aspiration to live in peace doesn’t mean that Israel is going to take this kind of situation any longer…enough is enough.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also said, “I’m telling them now it may be the last minute. I’m telling them stop it, we are stronger…there will be more blood there. Who wants it? We don’t want it.”

Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said, “We are sending [the Gazans] a message that the Hamas leadership has turned them into a punching bag for everyone. It is a leadership that has turned schoolyards into rocket launching pads. This is a leadership that does not care that the blood of its people will run in the streets.

They sound like typical wife-beaters, don’t they? Typical burly men who smash the living daylights out of their wives or girl friends: “I don’t want to hurt you, why don’t you just listen to me? Why do you make me do this to you?” And, as we all know, when the timid little wife decides she’s had enough, Wife Beater aggresses with even more force and violence. Many times he ends up killing her. These stories are sickening enough. But it becomes an outrage—a communal crime—when the entire neighborhood stands up for Wife Beater, condemning the wife and telling her to crawl back to her humiliating and harmful existence. This has been the role of the US and the governments of the world (most of them, the “ones that count,” anyway).

The US government and American politicians have defended, zealously, the holocaust in Gaza. President Bush said that he understands “Israel’s right to protect itself.” The White House spokesman said: “the United States understands that Israel needs to take actions to defend itself.” He also blamed Hamas for the massacre: “In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel…”

Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid has said: “What the Israelis are doing is very important…” The supposedly progressive Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman and others all support Israel in this massacre, couching it in terms of “defense.”

For those who are waiting for January 20th for some sort of magical change, well, dream on. Obama has appointed for himself a rabidly Zionist administration—Rahm Emanuel, Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden are just a few. He has remained rather quiet about the Gaza holocaust, only making an extremely ambivalent comment. But his senior advisor David Axelrod said that Obama understood Israel’s urge to respond to Hamas. Axelrod also reminded the public about Obama’s statements while in Israel (on his visit he ignored the Palestinians completely) in July 2008 when he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” As Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah said in a recent article, “This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always the ‘terrorists’.”

It’s quite reminiscent of the English reaction to the Irish Famine. And as Mitchel, the Irish political writer said of the British parliament that, despite their differences, “they agree most cordially in the policy of taxing, prosecuting, and ruining [the Irish].”

Our politicians may be content, for the sake of power, to comply with the lies of Israel, one such lie is that they sincerely try not to kill civilians. But, as Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, wrote after the massacre at the UN school that “every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night’s butchery on their hands.”

The UN’s impotence played out before the world when it, with a great flourish of blue paper, basically stated that it “hoped” for a ceasefire. That is to say, even though it called to a ceasefire (which is legally binding), it has done nothing to ensure that it is implemented. [Especially when the US abstained from the vote, basically nullifying it completely]. When masses of innocent people are being slaughtered every single day, “hope” from the world leaders is not enough. Nor is it acceptable at all that the UN views the holocaust in Gaza as a two-sided war. In this way it upholds the PR lie of the Israelis.

The Metaphor They Killed By

Namely that Hamas is the problem. We’ll blame it on Hamas. The world should buy it, right? After all, Hamas is labeled a terrorist organization. They’ve been firing rockets onto our colonial settlements. We can tell the world that we gave them water and electricity. We left their land two years ago. But they still fired rockets and actually killed a couple people.

It’s a crafty explanation, no doubt. But, like Swiss cheese, it’s full of holes.

First of all, Israel never left Gaza. That’s why they continue to control the water and the land passages in and out of Gaza. That’s why they have been able to sustain the blockade of Gaza. If Palestinian fishermen go beyond six miles out at sea they are shot by Israelis. Airplanes have been flying over Gaza and shooting missiles since they “left.” Israel never stopped occupying Gaza, they just changed the form of occupation.

In the past year alone (before this latest massacre) 546 Palestinians (76 of then children) were killed. Only 16 Israelis (most of them soldiers) have been killed. Israel is a nuclear power. Israel is the 4th largest military exporter in the world. Israel’s economy has been booming (due to its “dabbling” in security technology) while every other economy in the world has been crashing. Israel also receives billions of dollars a year from the United States.

How dare Israel—or the rest of the world—place Hamas on the same footing as a superpower of that caliber? Even Olmert admitted it saying, “we have enormous power, we can do things which will be devastating. And I keep restraining myself and I keep restraining my friends all the time and I tell them ‘lets wait, let’s wait, let’s wait. Let’s give them another chance.’”

If the Israeli government can do things that will be devastating, they obviously do not have a security problem and have zero need to defend itself. It is an insult to human intelligence to place these two groups on equal footing: the occupier and the occupied, the oppressor and the oppressed, the warden and the prisoner. And apt analogy would be equalizing a rapist with the one being raped. There is no equalizing in that situation. There is only an entity in absolute power abusing it to the absolute full and an entity in absolute weakness unable to effectively defend itself at all.

Hamas is an impoverished government (democratically elected) trying to scrap together some semblance of autonomy for the Palestinian people. It has set up hospitals in Gaza, the university and other civil services. Its people have been starved, deprived of the most basic aid and all of their dignity. The Palestinian people are a people were kicked off their land 60 years ago. They were brutalized, massacred, and forced to flee. Many of those who remained were shoved into the concentration camp called Gaza. The infamous rockets that Hamas has been firing have been landing on land that is rightfully owned by the people now crowded in Gaza. People forget, or try to ignore, the fact that 60 years ago most of the people in Gaza were living in the stolen “Israeli” settlements that Hamas is targeting.

That is why Gaza is so crowded, why the vast majority of Gazans are refugees (80%)—because they were kicked off their land which was then claimed by Jewish settlers who then christened themselves Israelis with the blood of Palestinians.

So before people ask why Hamas continues to fire rockets. Let them be brave enough to remember these facts. Let them remember the history of Palestine and the present conditions of Palestinians. Let them face the truth. The disgracing truth that 60 years ago something took place—you can call it a holocaust, you can call it ethnic-cleansing, you can call it establishing the State of Israel—whatever you call it, we stood by and let it happen.

And when a people have been humiliated to the extreme degree that the Palestinians have been humiliated just remember the words of Michael in the fields of Athenry: “Nothing matters, Mary, when you’re free. Against the Famine and the Crown I rebelled. They cut me down. Now you must raise our child with dignity.”

Human beings will do whatever it takes to retrieve their dignity. And even if they end up dying in the act, or getting shipped off to a life of slave-labor, they will do it for their children, so that they, at least, may live in dignity. And they will pass this grievance on to their children—their children who still suffer from the injustice of the same oppressors. And they will remember.

The Irish political writer, Mitchel, warned that the Irish did not attribute the Famine to the “rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England.” He continued, saying that the people “believe that the seasons as they roll are but ministers of England’s rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy claw of England in their dish.”

And the Irish did, indeed, remember England’s tyranny. The song I quoted in the beginning may have been set in the 1840′s, but it was written in the 1970′s when the Irish were, once again, being driven from their homes, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and starved: “Against the Famine and the Crown I rebelled. They cut me down.” And they did it for the dignity of their children.

And people will never stop striving for this. For, with every crime of a transgressing power—whether it be first impoverishing and starving and then imprisoning an Irishman for attempting to feed his child, or whether it be first entrapping and starving and then killing a Palestinian for attempting to fight its occupier –people will always remember. Like Mary in the song, they will hunger for the loss of their inalienable, God-given rights. And nothing will satiate them except justice:

   By a lonely harbor wall
   She watched the last star falling
   As that prison ship sailed out against the sky
   Sure she’ll wait and hope and pray
   For her love in Botany Bay
   It’s so lonely round the Fields of Athenry.

          Low lie the fields of Athenry
          Where once we watched the small free birds fly
          Our love was on the wing
          We had dreams and songs to sing
          It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry.

To listen to a nice version of this song please go here.

It may be all quiet on the Western front, but apparently it’s not that relevant. Recently, two ghost detainees, who disappeared in Pakistan in March 2003, conveniently reappeared last month in Afghanistan where they were promptly arrested by American officials.

The first detainee, Aafia Siddiqui, is a 36-year-old Pakistani national and MIT PhD graduate, now being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. The second is her 12-year-old American son — her eldest child — still being held in Afghanistan. Her two younger children (also American citizens) also disappeared with her in 2003, but their whereabouts are still unknown. The youngest was only 6-months at the time.

Elaine Sharp, Aafia’s lawyer, interviewed her last week and says it is certain that she was held in Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan. They had to talk through the food slot at the bottom of Aafia’s cell door for the entire 3 hour session.

“The whole situation made it impossible for me to meet properly with my client,” says Sharp. “The abuse was horrendous. It was physical, as well as psychological. It was torture.” In early 2003, the FBI announced it wanted to take Aafia Siddiqui in “for questioning,” though they admitted they had “no information indicating this individual is connected to specific terrorist activities.”

A few weeks later, Aafia and her three children were picked up by Pakistani police and were not seen or heard from again for the next five years. The FBI, however, continued to list her as “wanted,” denying that she was held by Pakistan — or any other country. In May 2004, then-Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller accused Aafia of being an al-Qaeda member, claiming she was still at large.

Their evidence: While in America, Aafia opened a PO box. Also, her bank account displayed suspicious behavior. That is to say, she made automatic withdrawals to a few Muslim charities. However, more puzzling than her disappearance is Aafia’s reemergence. Why would the US concoct a scenario that would bring Aafia out of total oblivion and back into the public eye? To give her a chance at justice?

On the one hand, human rights groups have been pressuring the US to bring an end to the captivity of the “Grey Lady of Bagram,” Prisoner 650, the woman whose screams and agony have haunted the hearts of released Bagram prisoners (until now, the US denies holding any women at the airbase). Perhaps Aafia is the Grey Lady, finally given face and name.

On the other hand, this is an election year, a time of great opportunity for politicians. Those on the way out can actually have something to show for their term-and-a-half “War on Terror,” while those trying to come in can have something to flex their muscles with.

Speculation aside, Aafia faces trial here in the US, being charged with attempted murder and assault of US personnel. No al-Qaeda. No terrorism. The government has nothing on her except their story of her second arrest in Afghanistan this past July.

The story goes that some US personnel entered the room where Aafia was kept and, on not seeing her, one agent put down his M4. Then Aafia, half-starved, allegedly jumped out from behind a curtain, picked up the gun, and began shooting (conveniently for them, she missed).

This story would not seem so ridiculous until you realize they had to make something up to explain Aafia’s gunshot wound (they say she was shot in self-defense). The bullet wound went septic from lack of proper treatment and put her in danger of death. The judge then ordered an emergency medical assessment, to see whether or not she will need to be moved to a hospital for immediate treatment.

Today, Aafia sports a broken nose, improperly reset. Her teeth have been pulled out. One of her kidneys has been removed, leaving a gashing scar down her abdomen. It is reported that she has been repeatedly raped. She is dehydrated and weak, unable even to walk. Psychologically, Aafia is confused and possibly suffers from brain damage.

But the physical and psychological nightmare hasn’t ended for her. Before and after every legal visit or trip to the court, Aafia is stripped naked and has to endure a cavity search. She has informed her legal team that she will not accept visits anymore due to the degradation and humiliation of the procedure.

Aafia is due to face trial this September. Ahmad, her eldest child, is still detained in Afghanistan. The other two, certainly the youngest American prisoners of war ever, are still unaccounted for. America’s disappeared in the War on Terror have been given scant attention. With women and children now victims, will the silence be broken?

* This article first appeared at altmuslim.