Mourners Kaddish in Seattle

Gaza in my heart

By Hannah Mermelstein
Saturday, January 24, 2009
http://hannahinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/01/gaza-in-my-heart.html


I am sad.
Deeply sad.
A sadness that is somehow scarier than the anger, because the anger is an expression, and the sadness just sits.

I want to share my sadness with the world. Somehow I believe that if everyone in the US felt the sadness I feel about Gaza, no massacre would happen ever again, anywhere. Part of my sadness, though, and my fear, is that I am not sure whether this is true.

Unread e-mails sit in my inbox. I still haven’t watched the video plea from the doctor in Gaza whose three daughters were killed. I still haven’t read the testimony of the nine-year-old boy whose father was shot and killed in front of him while his hands were in the air. Or the girls who walked out of their house carrying white cloths and were shot and killed on the spot. Or all the children who somehow survived with no food for days as they lay next to their dead relatives’ rotting bodies or crawled to nearby buildings to wait out the bombing. I read the headlines only, and then I stop. I cannot continue.

I received an e-mail today from an American Jew I know who has just entered Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. She shares one story: “I met a mother who was at home with her ten children when Israeli soldiers entered the house. The soldiers told her she had to choose five of her children to "give as a gift to Israel." As she screamed in horror they repeated the demand and told her she could choose or they would choose for her. Then these soldiers murdered five of her children in front of her.”

The nightmare of reality is truly more horrific than anyone could imagine. And yet I worry that if I share this story, or any number of others that are flooding my inbox, some might not believe them. They are almost unbelievable. And yet. Story after story. I worry that some might dismiss the unbearable suffering of 1.5 million people as mere propaganda. And I worry, quite selfishly, that I cannot handle the doubts right now. That I am holding all this sadness and all this anger and that my faith in humanity is on the line, and one more person who dismisses a tragedy as propaganda, or one more person who justifies massacre in the name of security or self-defense, might just break me.

So I wonder if I should share these stories. I go back and forth. If this mother’s five children were still alive, would Israel’s army be any more moral? If the 1,312 Palestinians killed in the past month were still alive, would Israel’s 18-month siege of Gaza be justified? If Israel had never occupied Gaza in the first place, would it have any more right to exist as an ethnically and religiously exclusive state?

I search for the roots, I write from the roots, I act from the roots. Israel is bad from inception, Zionism is wrong, and we need to boycott until all Palestinians have rights. Yes. This is true. But right now I’m thinking of this mother. And all the mothers. And wondering if this pain can just spread, spread until it is diffused. I’m wondering if the world can hold this pain, just for a moment. Hold it collectively. I don’t want to have to fight anymore. I don’t want to answer questions about why “they” hate “us” and I don’t want to resent the lightheartedness of strangers on the street. I just want this to stop.

I know, of course, that for it to stop, we must know where it started. Tomorrow I will get back to working on that. But right now, right now, let us just hold the people of Gaza in our hearts and hope that somehow, against all odds, they will rebuild their lives, that soon they will get a full night’s sleep without nightmares, and that sometime they will feel joy again.

-Hannah

P.S. And because I can’t end any e-mail without sharing more resources, check out the new website www.thinkpalestineact.org. It has lots of great multi-media and popular education tools regarding Gaza and Palestine in general. And keep checking it. It will grow. And check www.endtheoccupation.org for updates about campaigns throughout the country and for ways to engage President Obama (I know, I know, maybe naïve, but I do believe that the image of Obama, if not the man himself, has created the biggest opening we’ve had in electoral politics in a long time).
Posted by Hannah Mermelstein, Saturday, January 24, 2009
http://hannahinpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/01/gaza-in-my-heart.html

Gaza Vigil at Consulate Jan 19, 2009

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Philadelphians Stand With Gaza Jan8,09

Posters for Gaza

Standing with Gaza

A Palestinian in Gaza chronicles life under Israeli bombardment 4:50pm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/gaza-diary-israel

Register your outrage by calling the Israeli Embassy on Monday.

To find the Israeli Embassy nearest you:
http://www.israelemb.org/israeli-consulate-in-usa.htm

Philadelphia is 215-977-7600 ext. 501

"Gaza is surrounded by an electrified fence on three sides: imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to Israeli planes and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare.

Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains.

Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli "insecurity." The whole world must sympathize, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities, and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged in a "cycle of violence" that has to be stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while we ought to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country: the other is a stateless dispossessed population of people without rights or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life has been either hijacked or so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture - slowly, fastidiously, inexorably.

That is the truth of what Palestinians suffer."

Edward Said
August, 2002