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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William B. Kohn who wrote (25188)	4/14/2002 9:46:51 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Conditions of Palestinian life cultivate desperation By IBTISAM S. BARAKAT Knight Ridder Newspapers Posted on Sun, Apr. 14, 2002 Ramallah is my hometown, and the events there over the last few weeks have been crushing to watch. They came at night: 20,000 Israeli troops, U.S.-made Apache helicopters that madly shoot 800mm bullets, F-16 warplanes and 150 Israeli-made Markavah tanks, each weighing 6 tons. They cut off electricity and water outlets. They blocked the hospitals with tanks and forbade the ambulances and medical people from moving. A 22-year-old friend of mine got injured. He called the hospitals a hundred times. They apologized. "They will shoot us if we move our trucks. Bite the bullet," they said. And he did. He poured a mound of salt inside his wound. And he burned it with his cigarettes to keep it sanitized. He lit up a candle and laughed. "I am not dead," he realized. Because the ambulances were not allowed to help the injured, many people died as their families watched, my friend told me. A woman with her five daughters sat with her dead mother in the same room for three days. A young neighbor, he said, was hit by a bomb that tore him up into tiny bits. And the Israeli soldiers are making Palestinian men take off their clothes at checkpoints and are sending them home naked. All of this is because the Palestinians are declaring that 35 years of military occupation and oppression is enough. Wouldn't that be enough for U.S. citizens if America were occupied? As a kid in Ramallah, I learned there that being Palestinian was not a neutral fact. You could get imprisoned or killed if you expressed out loud the love for your country. Being Palestinian meant to be occupied, to be driven out of one's land, and to be always occupied by survival. It was from Ramallah that I ran away shoeless in the war of 1967 and almost lost my feet. And to Ramallah I returned four months after the war ended. In Ramallah, I studied in U.N. refugee schools where they gave us cod-liver oil capsules and nauseating milk in tin cans. I poured the milk on the dirt when teachers were not watching. I learned what daily hunger felt like. But in Ramallah, I also learned from other girls to draw (secretly) a Palestinian flag. My mother and teachers would have beaten me had they seen it. It could have led them to prison. And in Ramallah, I learned from children older than me to wait until midnight, get to bed, then pull the cover over my head. We listened to Palestinian radio. The voice reached us faintly and talked of freedom from somewhere outside the border. During the day, we spoke about what we heard at night. That is how we defied adults. We cursed the short radio signals that interrupted the Palestinian voice and made it come to us like pounding waves. But day after day, we all could decipher the words. They said things about Gaza, Nablus and Ramallah. "That's us," we exclaimed. And they aired songs that we learned. I sang the songs below my breath as I walked to my school and passed the sniper soldiers stationed on roofs. I understand why a Palestinian child commits suicide. I understand the crushing currency one deals with when one is dehumanized for so long and is denied hope for so long. I understand desperation. I have learned that on slave ships, captured Africans would throw themselves into the water rather than complete the journey and be sold. And some women who were enslaved decided to kill their own children rather than have them endure slavery. But the loss of anyone is a loss to all of us; no person is ever replaceable. My hope for my people and the Israelis is to know freedom from the role of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. I dream of freedom with one another, rather than freedom from one another. I left Ramallah 15 years ago, but I think about it every day. I especially think about a day when U.N. resolutions to end Israeli occupation of Palestine are honored, and when the Israeli army leaves Palestinian cities and doesn't come back, except to make amends. There will be peace when that happens. And we will know that there is space for all of us. We will repair our broken relationships, and our children will sing for freedom for all people, and read poetry to heal our wounds, our world. We will know that there is no inherent conflict between humans. ______________________________ ABOUT THE WRITER Ibtisam S. Barakat is an educator, poet and writer She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org ______________________________ philly.com

To: William B. Kohn who wrote (25188)	4/15/2002 12:37:27 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi William B. Kohn; Re: Seems strange that a terror bombing that kills dozens of people at a religious service or a family celebration doesn't qualify as "collective punishment". The suicide bombers most definitely count as "collective punishment", as do most of the actions of the Israelis. The whole thing disgusts me completely. Two wrongs don't make a right, but it appears that two right wing governments make a bloodbath. -- Carl P.S. Okay, it's a "fracas" or "serious disorder", a bloodbath requires at least a thousand deaths per week. A "holocaust" is another order of magnitude worse. With 6 million Jews killed in 5 years, the numbers work out to be about 23,000 per week.