While the Western world spent the last week watching, talking, analyzing, criticizing, etc.… Kim Kardashian’s buttocks. The Eastern world busied itself in the see-through dress of Haifa Wahbe.
And in between major news went on unnoticed.
Not anymore, Palestine and Jerusalem cycle of vicious racism takes back the headlines… at least ours.
Last night a Palestinian Bus Driver was found strangled while on his night shift in Jerusalem. Youssef, 32, a father of two children. Another Palestinian whose murder is “unclear”, regardless to the clear hard strangling line on his mortified corpse and clear beating signs on the body. The killers are unknown, again, and if found, will be again a group of “ insane”, “mentally disordered” group of people.
It is another time, a vicious sign of a racist dangerous curb of the situation. Hate crimes connected to some fundamentalist ideology of persecuting the other in a pattern. Last week a young Palestinian was burnt (but didn’t die) after a group of Israelis set him on fire.
This crime revives in our minds the ugly murder of M. Abu Khdeir in July. As my youngest daughter keeps reminding us upon mentioning the murder: “ he wasn’t killed, he was burnt alive”.
I am just trying to distantly imagine what happened to Youssef last night. Driving Israeli passengers, a group who decidedly chose a bus with an Arab driver and plotted the murder. Did it happen while the rest of the passengers watch? Did they wait until the last stop and mobbed around him and beat him and strangled him to death? Where they also a bunch of teen-agers mentored by another fanatic Rabbi? Or maybe they were the same murderers of Abu Khdeir who were freed for insanity?
I will not ignore the Palestinian committed murders and incitements in the last month as a consequence, first with the series of ramming by settlers on Palestinians that ended up with Palestinians ramming Israeli pedestrians in Jerusalem.
There is no place for justifying a murder even if it is an oppressed, violated, suppressed, humiliated Palestinian. But I do understand where the anger, the reaction to oppression comes from.
I do understand that there is no worse than deciding to kill ones own life when no hope for a better day is in the horizon anymore.
On the Israeli side however, it is not the same. I could understand the need of vengeance that arouses from the situation. The anger and all. But the Israeli commits a crime that he knows hundred percent he will get away with it, while the Palestinian commits a crime that he knows hundred percent that it is his very own life that will be the cost.
The Israeli choose to take his own revenge from his enemy while he knows that his government is taking his rights back. And yet he decides to apply the law collectively, as if with an indirect organization with the government.
It seems like all Israelis are out there on the run in the killing game of Palestinians. You can belong to the police, to the army, to the settlers, to any security group, you can own a gun, and you can be part of the Palestinian killing game.
The end game is always with a secure result ; when a Palestinian kills he automatically becomes a killed terrorist .his family is deemed to imprisonment, his home is demolished and his children are forever orphaned . When an Israeli kills he automatically gets away with it, with an insanity statement, or self defense claim …if he ever gets caught..
And what is worse is that the news in the US only reports the murders of the Israelis – and this time they were American Israelis. But no mention of the earlier Palestinian deaths. It’s almost as crazy as Americans saying in a poll that one of our biggest health problems is Ebola, when no American has died from it. But, in Liberia mothers and babies are dying because hospitals are afraid to care for them. We live in terrible times but the sun will rise.
The sun will rise, but it will not give back life to a lifeless body.
And too Nadia, I understand all to well, believe me! And I have penned poem after poem about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinian people with impunity and with the blessings of the U.S. government. Please know that what is happening is not setting well with many of us and we would change things if we could. But alas, we can’t even stop our own from dying on these mean streets.
Take care,
Shelby
yes.. the sun will rise… actually , the sun never rises.. it has been always there . it is the earth that moves around what we see as rising)))). .
it is not that i intend to sound like a preacher )) , but it is very real , that our will , all of us , everywhere to make a change of an unjust situation regardless where we are, who we are , and how much we might be ourselves in a worse or a better situation … it is this willingness to live for justice that makes the sun looks as if it decided to rise ))
thank u for ur kindness
many other stories take place that r not even on any news. yesterday, among other stories, an israeli bus driver rammed over three palestinians next to Nablus, one died , around 20 years old..
..and if not for reading about this here, I would never have known. Unfortunately, many people are just too self-absorbed to even both to care about what happens to others. And so it continues…..