Thank you Mr. President, it was your speech that distracted me while I was collecting my sister’s fragments. I heard you saying: Israel has the right to defend itself… achieving peace in the middle east…. Hamas was sending rockets ….. democracy … and other words that I cannot remember. I am sorry again, I was striving to concentrate in your speech but the smell of my sister’s body and my fear that I may lose some of it didn’t help me to grasp what you were saying exactly. I just realised our neighbour’s anger when he turned the TV off murmuring that he wasted the battery for nothing. We had already pulled out the corps of my mother and half of the corps of my father; we couldn’t find the rest of his body. To be frank with you, I never thought of addressing any American president, I mean, it goes without saying that we are killed with American weapons and taxes. The doctors in the hospitals said that Americans were experimenting a new weapon called DIME in this war, I mean the war on Gaza. We don’t talk to the enemy.
But during the funeral I heard you...in an interview with an Arab TV channel saying that you want to deliver us a message that America is not our enemy. Oh, I felt responsibility, it seems Mr. President that someone is playing behind your back, it seems that you don’t know that we are killed with your weapons, it seems that those who use the veto to protect Israel and let it get away with its crimes against us in the security council are just doing this without even telling you, it seems that you don’t know that your country annually pumps a huge amount of money to Israel, well Mr. President, Israel is the enemy, and we didn’t choose it. We didn’t beg for check points, we didn’t beg for blockage, we didn’t beg for cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and this new bomb you are experimenting on us.
Besides, I heard you saying that you want to achieve peace in the Middle East; I know, I know, it is us, we are the Middle East. Why Mr. President? Why do you want to achieve more peace in us? We had enough peace; we had more than enough peace during the last war. Do you want to achieve more? The blond woman called Livni said that she wants peace that is why Israel waged this aggression on us. I lost my whole family in this peace process. And those who imposed the blockage on Gaza – during which one of my cousins died because of the shortage of medicine – always talk about peace: Abbas, Fayyad, Mubarak. They are men of peace, exactly like Livni. They did all what they can to achieve peace, I don’t think that you need more peace, do you?
I went to my cousin’s home, he also lost all his family, I am in his custody now. He is my all family and I am his only family. He is twenty one years old as I told you before, he was a student in the faculty of medicine, but he was not allowed to graduate, the blockage and the bad circumstances pushed him to leave the university and work, then he joined the resistance during this last war. He is a Hamas member now....
[Y]ou want to harm my cousin too because he is a terrorist. I wonder what is wrong with terrorists like my cousin. He is a very nice guy, you would like him if you met him. He prepares breakfast for me, he cooks very delicious smashed eggs, he takes me to school, he stays all night besides me because I have nightmares every night, and when I wake up startled with the frightening nightmare he puts his hand on my forehead and recites some verses from the Quran and sing me beautiful songs till I fall asleep again. After school he plays with me soccer in the street, he tells me very funny jokes and gorgeous fairy tales, he swings me along with his friends whom you call terrorists and I laugh to tears.
On my neighbour’s TV I watched you practicing some terrorism with your daughters; you were playing with them exactly like my cousin plays with me. Why don’t you want my cousin to be a good terrorist like you? Why do you want to make peace in my country while you all live in terrorism happily? Did we annoy you Mr. President? We don’t even know you, if someone in my district did anything wrong to you just tell me and I will oblige him to apologize for you.
As a general observation, we Americans do not know enough about what is going on in Gaza, and we certainly don’t understand the role our own government plays in it. We operate, if at all, under shallow mainstream media assessments driven by exclusively Western perspectives. Take Ali’s play with the words “peace” and “terrorist” as a particularly poignant example. I have spoken with some people, often Jewish and mostly on facebook, about our different views on the war. I can’t help but be frustrated by what I feel is often (but certainly not always) a parroting of one-lines with no genuine attempt to understand the conflict from a Gazan perspective. Justify, justify, platitude, justify. But if America is going to hold Israel’s hand while Israel does what it has done to Ali and so many others, we should know. We should not just know, but KNOW.
There are intelligent people who support Israel. But it’s not just about intelligence, it’s about marrying that intelligence with some measure of compassion and empathy. Not the false, superficial kind. Not the war-is-always -horrible,- but…-with-no-real-attempt-to-identify-and-assess-your-own-biases- kind. And there are compassionate people who support Israeli policies, too; I guess it’s just that, in my opinion, they are listening to the wrong version of the “truth”. I can’t ask anyone to believe or not believe certain sources of information. After all, I’m sure that people who support Israeli policies in Gaza are thinking the same thing about me. But I can ask people to at least really, truly think about it before they make up their minds. Peace is not going to be achieved unless people LISTEN. And besides, Ali and his family, and all others who have died in this conflict, deserve it.
Call for accountability for abuses of international law in Gaza and southern Israel
From the AI email I got:
Hours before Israel announced a ceasefire, an Amnesty International fact finding mission gained access to Gaza. Their initial reports are disturbing: the team found first hand evidence of war crimes, serious violations of international law and possible crimes against humanity by all parties to the conflict. ...Obama on Israel-Palestine (Via the Traveller Within)
In the early afternoon of January 4th, three young paramedics walked through a field on a rescue mission to save a group of wounded men in a nearby orchard. A 12-year-old boy, standing by his house, assisted the operation by pointing to where the men could be found. An Israeli air strike on the area killed all four.
The bodies of the four victims could not be retrieved for two days. Ambulance crews who tried to approach the site came under fire from Israeli forces.
Our researchers later traveled to the scene of the strike with the two ambulance drivers who witnessed the attack. They met with the boy’s distraught mother and found the remains of the missile. The label of the missile read, “guided missile, surface attack” and cited the United States as the country of origin.
This is just one of many similar stories.
Under the Geneva Conventions, medical personnel searching, collecting, transporting or treating the wounded must be protected and respected in all circumstances. Clearly, this was not the case on Jan. 4th.
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