When the declaration of the Palestinian independence was announced on 15 November 1988 in Algeria, the dream of liberation became a step closer. We were in the middle of the first Intifada, and the stories of-of our heroic resilience were impressive even to us. We believed that it was time for liberation. After living a whole life, (I was fifteen back then) under occupation, only commemorating one misery after another, it was the time that we have a real Palestinian day.
With its pleasant and worse, this day became a symbol.
However, independence never came even though a state has been declared in a similar symbolic empty setting, this time in the UN.
As I am looking at myself, three times older than that day when the independence was first declared, I bow down my head with disappointment that continued to impose itself on the Palestinian living hood since Oslo.
Sometimes I try to justify what took place, which resulted in Oslo, at times I think it is ok that we, the people who never left this country, neither voluntarily or by force, were always privileged in the sense that we never tasted the bitter feeling of the diaspora. But apparently, the diaspora we imagined was not the diaspora that the people in what became the Palestinian Authority lived in. It is not the poor people of the refugee camps, whose lives only became more and more miserable and intolerable with time.
It sounds like gangsters in the disguise of a national movement hijacked us, as a nation. No matter how I try to make, things look healthy, adjustable to our lives. No matter how I try to make this process of the so-called Oslo anything that can give a Palestinian statehood. Anything that can make us a nation … a country that was lost since Oslo.
Before the “Independence,” our life had a shape of a life of people who struggled for liberation, but we were one nation, one people. Even the relationship with the Israelis was better. Our worst nightmares were flying checkpoints who became permanent. And we were so spoilt we were throwing stones and burning wheels and going in demonstrations, and the Israelis only hit us and smashed urn legs and occasionally killed some.
Our life was a life of people who sincerely strived from existence. A life of individuals whose cause is the cause that is so just it split the world and no power was able to diminish it or its people …
All these years later
We are still under occupation
Killing became a way of living
Children are sentenced to jail
If lucky, not to be killed
Oppression continues…
the colonial settlement is in our neighborhoods.
Our leadership struggles to keep its existence. All about individual people.
The homeland became each one’s house and family.
Religion, political affiliation became the cause …
On this day, we are celebrating the defeat of our purpose ….deliberately …………
Also, at this moment in life…. We are all partners in this crime. Because there are no more secrets hidden, and there is no more unknown to be discovered…. Just our continuous defeat
Sadly, a similar situation exists in too many places around the world. We have suffering caused by “sanctions” such as in Yemen, Iran, N. Korea that only leave the women, children, old people, hungry, poor sick. We have the endless wars of Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, again the women, children, old people, hungry, poor, and sick suffer. Here in the USA, black people, despite the accomplishments of some individuals, as a group, do not control their destinies, have no real united power. We live in a time in which only courageous, conscious, compassion practiced by individuals and nations will create a humane world.
Sadly;(