From Gaza to Jerusalem

From Gaza to Jerusalem

It is only the shared despair that can be shared under a gloomy crying sky.
My reflections feel broken to me . My mind swings between Jerusalem and Gaza , with a bit of selfish feeling of satisfaction , because Jerusalem ,as if enthrallingly listened to the agony of Gaza and chose to be the Jean d’Arc of this despondency.
My affections have been always accompanied with nuisance and helplessness that resume to be the same, but yet , there is a sense of struggling to survive that is emerging in my veins as a Palestinian. For the first months since years, I feel that Palestine is still thriving inside its people .
And somehow; derisively perhaps, it is between Gaza and Jerusalem . Two cities with recurring coercion and oppression. One is sieged and ravaged, and the other is walled and discriminated.
Jerusalem is inside a volatile situation that is uncontrolled, unrestrained and blistering . Those nurtured inside the fist of occupation for the last two decades are the ones out of control and rampant .
Israel would never attempt to understand what it means to be oppressed , or maybe because there is this previously oppressed Israeli bred mentality that makes them the masters of reproduced oppression.
As Jerusalem continue to mourn its slain martyrs. Those who decided to end their lives determinedly realizing that they will never be back home, and those whose lives were unwillingly pilfered. All murdered predators and victims are mourned by their city despite the sustained efforts to collectively punish all Palestinians.
What Israel doesn’t seem to realize is, that force can be used excessively for a limited time only. No matter how long coercion lasts, it remains derisively inadequate.
It is like a relationship in a forced marriage with an abusive man. Often, women cannot leave, but at some point many do, and murder, if not chop and slice a piece her and there out.
What is it that Israel is trying to demonstrate or impose? The more we Palestinians misbehave, disobey, the more violent Israel will become ?
Do they really think that after a family loses the father or the son or the husband, who was slain brutally by this vicious dreadful force, a demolished house, or cutting social security , or banning or withholding residency will really intimidate them ?
If any sensible Israeli observed what happened in Gaza’s resistance in July. He should have noticed that Gaza’s resisting generation is the generation of the 2009 aggression. Children and youth who watched their families getting slaughtered, and became homeless and starved. Children who lost friends playing with them, and schools bombarded are those who are leading a new generation of uncorrupted resistance. Not out of an inherited cause, but a residing misery that continues. A whole education that was fed under coercion, bombardment, blockade , obstruction and continued massacres.
If the individuals who decided to ram Israelis in their cars , or stab , or plot a copycat murder of many other murders committed against them, such as killing innocents in mosques , took their decisions as a consequence of the obvious helpless desperate injustice and force that is coerced on them. What does Israel expect from their families, after undertaking what they are commissioning of compulsion and intimidation today?
I would have even identified with Israel if the war against Palestinians was not decisively collective.
What do you want us to do when we are the target f a next killing or abuse anyway?
Abu Khdeir was killed and his murderers are free. His family is continuously distraught, arrested and threatened. Yusef was strangled, the murderers are unknown and free, and Palestinian drivers in Egged company were fired.
All were slayed in cold blood by Israelis, and the families are threatened and arrested , and had their housed demolished , including neighbors.
Yes it is frightening, frustrating and startling . I don’t want to be the neighbor of the next Palestinian desperate-of-this-hellish-life attacker, you Israel would think. I don’t want him to be my son, or husband or brother. I don’t want that attacker to be me.
But …
After a very simple thought , I would think , any and all Palestinians would think , why would I care ? I am threatened anyway …
If my son, husband, brother is not the next attacker, he might likely be the next to be attacked.
My house could always be the next house on the demolition list . If it is not mine, it is a neighbors, which will cause cracks in mine anyway .
My residency is loomed with intimidation anyway. We are all part o this kafkasque-list of whose down next.
The social security , the medical service ? My life in Jerusalem is about paying your government. We work to pay you . We receive third-class, no- class services and we pay for first-class services. Almost all Jerusalemites have fines and files in collecting courts that only increase with no sense.
Life under coercion is still life under occupation. In the last decades Israel managed to intimidate, manipulate people into attempting to convince us and the world , that living under the democratic state of occupation is still better than witnessing a weak corrupt Palestinian to-be state.
Today Israel is proving to us and to the world, coercion under your own state could be vicious, is vicious and unacceptable and ugly ; but coercion and occupation remain to be the undefeatable equation in what makes apartheid gates open for an upcoming era.
Naively, as I have always been, towards my insights to my own people. I admit that my ingenious attained the Israeli prospect this time. I always thought that apartheid is still far reached from Israel, not because of its morality, but for its wisdom…
Today, I can say, that Israel has entered an era that may dent towards its end … not because we will toss them to the sea, but because like in the story of Moses and the Pharaoh , they will hedge deliberately to the sea believing , conceitedly that they overpower an unlimited sea…