Abu Saeed, 78 years old, was born at 1:00 PM on the 22ndof October 1941, not far from his demolished home a few months ago. Now his uprooted olives and almonds, his solar panels that were crashed, the satellite dish that went to pieces, and documents of ownership to the land he inherited from his father and with reliable power insists he will give only to his children. The older man, who is older than the occupying state of Israel, stood with his aging body and bare hands, trying to save what could be saved from his trees.
As the older man and his children and grandchildren were helplessly trying to replant what was not stolen from the last invasion to their land, tears of despair could not but escape his old eyes.
Abu Saeed recalls his birth story, pointing with his hands towards the east and the west of the mountain when his mother went to the hospital while she was still in her 7thmonth of pregnancy. On the way back on what has today become a touristic path in Battir, she had her contractions and gave birth. The father cuddled the newborn with his dress and went home with a child.
It seems an impossible situation of despair and helplessness when one looks at it from a living horizon where justice cannot be seen, but yet, this older man and his grandchildren can be granted life with simple acts of support.
“They destroy, and we build” was the first sentence the old man uttered when we met him.
“Will you build our home?” young Saeed, the child of 8 years old, asked. A boy born after six months of pregnancy, surviving hardly, with a disability that does not show in his beautiful face.
Somehow, the brutality that occurs by occupation keeps reproducing itself: same story, different faces of resistance.