A lost cause …. or fractioned /sliced cause

I wrote this in the 2008 invasion on Gaza. Back then I was considering myself a pious Hamas defender. At least Hamas was our choice as people in the election . After a week of watching the news and seeing the toll of death increasing , something switched off in my head and I became furious on Hamas and on the world. Suddenly something in my head was telling me that regardless to the injustice that is befalling on us , Hamas had an obligation not to make the people as the target for scoring points against Israel . 

now, and again after six years ,the same scene is back . The aggression is fiercer . Hamas ..if it is Hamas is stronger . Somehow I have to admit that the word Resistance is the word I feel . Probably because of what took place in the last month in the west bank and latest in Jerusalem . Gaza wasn’t far anymore in my mind as a Palestinian . The Israeli aggression towards us Palestinians here took a serious leap . The face of fascist racism was the covering mask of each soldier involved . The scenes of children being dragged forcibly as their parents and people watch helplessly unable to do anything doesn’t leave my mind. The kidnapping of Mohammad Abu Khdeir , the ugly murder that was committed against him … all the destruction that surrounded us here in Jerusalem . Demonstrations. Check points.. Suddenly became what occupation is . 

Occupation is like rape … the difference between us here in Jerusalem and the West Bank ,and the people in Gaza , is that they are not willing to tolerate rape . Rape’s only cure is killing the rapist  Especially when the rapist remains out there raping other victims…or living the rest of life humiliated ripped off your basic feelings of being free. 

But yet , what I feel at this moment , maybe with less rage on Hamas, because I suddenly see resistance… or because the attack on Hamas is again on a peak . My lost cause of 2008 remains the same….with a cause that became sliced and fractioned as well ……

A lost cause

Suddenly everything about life becomes nothing but either existence or death, and it is all death that we see popping from TV screens. People still having chances of survival losing it with lack of any help, no medical resources or any kind of appropriate help.

Scrutinizing human lives being lost while we watch , a whole world watching , and still Palestinians fractions fighting and arguing of who is what , and Israel announcing this is the beginning ,and Washington asks Israel to avoid civilians ,and Hamas victoriously announces a death of an Israeli , and we keep roaming in this cycle of death .

Our death and their death…

Two hundred Palestinian souls for one Israeli soul, how cheap our souls are and how expensive theirs is.

And our leaders and theirs, using our lives to endorse their agendas. As if these people’s lives are the sacrifice to their politics. As if we do not exist. Hamas announcing that resistance is ongoing, of course the sacrifice is those people, those people who are being collected in cars like rice sacks.

The world cannot see these people any more, our leaders do not see them. People only transform into numbers.

It is so heartrending to witness, human lives being hovelled, with disregard to human veracity.

Shame on us who watch. Shame on us for looking into the tragedies of life and moving as if it is nothing except another episode of what is natural in life.

Hamas one more time announcing and calling for people to resist, Mishaal, Haniyyeh who cares, all reminding me of the Sahhaf and the ru3a3.

Resistance is something profound, even sacrificing ones soul for a cause is even more intuitive, but our cause is a lost cause, a cause lost between Palestinian fractions and Arab acquiescence, under an enormous force of domination and despotism, higher in power than ours within our meekness and fragmentations.

Even the lessons of the not very long yesterday cannot be grasped.

Some short time ago, when Iraq was invaded, we were expecting something concealed inside Iraq to make it survive, the Sahhaf was threatening and we were thinking he was there and he knew what they got .

The Americans were in Baghdad, isolating every street, occupying the airport, and the Sahhaf was still threatening.

Today, Hamas is threatening, and we know, and they know, that the only asset we have is the loss of those lives. As if these people are willing to sacrifice those poor people until the last person. As if Gaza’s asset is with the people Hamas is willing to sacrifice.

I wish, God is really up there just sending us any message telling us that all what we have is down here.

Hamas is using the same ways of Iraq, but they ignore the fact that we know, we know the Qassam, who cares if they fired 60 or 6000 missiles when they are more peaceful in their effects than their announcements.

And Fateh is calling for the release of their prisoners from the Hamas prisons,

And Egypt condemning Hamas for not listening, and the Arab foreign ministries will set their emergency meeting after six days.

And the number of people killed increase.

And we are still scrutinying,

Israel justifying its actions, Palestinians mitigating theirs, and victims are falling down.

In a world of injustices, yes, it appears that our victims are dissimilar than theirs; apparently an Israeli soul is more, much more, 200 times more important than a Palestinian soul.

The sight of this man, maybe he is a that man, or he was at this moment, being left to die, people around him not knowing what to do, his eyes staring up in glaze, maybe not knowing if he is still alive or already dead, waiting for death, who might not have been around for him yet, but he was glazing senseless waiting.

Those children running for their lives, rushing in streets from schools, with death surrounding them form everywhere.

Those wounded victims, who could have survived if they were properly moved out, those still missing under the rubbles of the attacks, those packed in hospitals waiting in a station for a closer stride up to paradise.

Is this resistance, or is it a waste of lives.

Perhaps this is how all occupied nations resisted, maybe this is how Omar Mukhtar led his revolution, and all resistance groups did. But at some point all was too faraway.

Too far from seeing it all too thump from our living rooms, it was all too far from our current present and becoming a just so close yesterday.

Another intifada?

For more lives to get lost, for what,

Even the occupation is left behind in all this scene of cruelty.

And it doesn’t really matter to any further extent,

Those lost lives,

For which cause have they been sacrificed?

It is all nothing but a lost cause.

 

I add on, to this state of loss, some words written by Edward Said maybe to add some light to this darkness:

 

“ Consciousness of the possibility of resistance can reside only in the individual will that is fortified by intellectual rigor and an unabated conviction in the need to begin again, with no guarantees except the confidence of even the loneliest and most impotent thought that “what has been cogently thought must be thought in some other place and by other people.” In this way thinking might perhaps acquire and express the momentum of the general, thereby blunting the anguish and despondency of the lost cause ,which its enemies have tried to induce.

We might well ask from this perspective if any lost cause can ever really be lost .”

 

Nadia Harhash

26-12-08