Our Palestinian life is about commemorating one tragedy after the other.
In a place we claim holy; while celebrating religious holidays can at some point if given the chance mount to each of the year days. . So are our political dates. While we politicize our religious holiday, we tend to holicize our political ones.
This year marks a notable date for our misfortune. It is 67 years of occupation since 1948, and 48 years of another occupation since 1967.
And as part of being perfectly confused, the numbers’ game seems to add a flavor to it all.
And in between those two dates we continue to commemorate our life in this place. A massacre after the other, all before even the existence of the current state of Israel. Diaspora. Expulsion. Prison. Occupation. Massacres. Genocide. Invasions. Uprooting… …whatever… A land stolen here… An olive tree stolen there. In this country all is subjugated to something even trees…. And in reality this overwhelming exaggeration is not exaggerated after all…. After all who steals trees from one land and plant them in another same land??? Well, on the other side of the map … or maybe actually inside a roaming circle of the same spot that became eventually called: settlements.
Settlements or Colonies? Occupation or Colonization? Expulsion or Fleeing? Nakba (Catastrophe) or Atzmaut (Independence)?
For the last 48\67 years. . And as they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Here, numbers are in the agony of the speaker. We have been generating dates that mark more of our tragedy as people and as a nation.
Yet, to make it worse… our life as a nation has become exactly like the map of what once we called homeland. While the occupation 67 or 68, it doesn’t matter continue to chop up the land. Cropping apiece here and planting a settlement there. Surrounding the map with a wall; apartheid, separation also whatever. A checkpoint here and a border there; flying or permanent; also it doesn’t matter. Uprooting a tree or a human being. Demolishing a house or expelling people .A highway, a freeway, a railway or also whatever. Encircling, enclaving, seizing or capturing …however….
We Palestinians “miraculously” find only time to declare winning or loss on our own tribal fractioned stupidity and immense failure as a nation.
We left all and busied ourselves in a threat of an assumption of “dreamy” elections when the “other” will win. The other is not the Israeli settler or occupier or invader or jailer. It is the other Palestinian from that other group that assumingly may win in a fearful democratic operation called elections.
The winning of the Islamic font (Hamas) in Birzeit University’s student elections. Points yet another time how decayed Fateh has become. And yet, instead of learning the lesson, which definitely wouldn’t be learnt, they are looking for reasons and accuses to de-estimate what happened.
As much as the elections in Birzeit University shouldn’t indicate anything except another university union body elections. It is a serious indicator to where Fateh is heading. Or where it has already headed. And Birzeit as an indicator is the most important because Birzeit University is the oldest and historically, it has always served as the community engine and leadership maker.
Of course what happened wasn’t a surprise, but actually is a very normal consequence of all the inner and surrounding destruction of Fateh in the last years.
And exactly like the historical Palestine map that has been cropped and chunked in the last decades into what is an actual divided cantons of un-soveiregn sovereignties and (the enemy) security safeguard. The war on un-sovereign entity and power within the Palestinian society is a micro level of a disaster, Nakba, of the Palestinian People, this time caused by Palestinian so-called leadership(s).