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They were 37 persons in the first floor, and they had to share the food, water and the candles in that flat. When they ran out of water, they asked the soldiers to permit them to go to the upper floors to get water from their houses. On the first day the soldiers refused, but after they pleaded, they allowed two persons she and another woman to pass accompanied by two soldiers, guns at ready. She said that although they were terrified,
they decided to go and get two buckets of water. The soldiers asked them what they were doing.
My friend who could speak English had to keep a running commentary on her actions like: “Now, I’m going to the kitchen to get containers”, “Now, I am looking for some bread
and milk”, “Now we are done, and we want to go back.” Forever seeking the positive she commented on a single grain of good coming out of this nightmare. The Israelis forced the neighbors to meet each other thus reinforcing relations among them and forging a stronger
community. They were no longer strangers. She showed high spirits, great courage and determination to survive despite all the hardships that had overtaken them. I felt glad to talk to her. My husband managed to buy a chicken, and for the first time in 3 weeks, we had chicken for lunch. At lunch Nana asked whether things would be normal again; and when the schools would
reopen. Vino then said that the most important thing was to have our home back to normal again. However, everything was in its place, except our bedroom, which was still a mess. I wished that the soldiers hadn’t broken the camera so that I could have taken pictures of the house and kept them as a record, because I was sure nobody would believe us otherwise. Why would anyone believe us anyway? We got no sympathy even when the pictures of destruction and humiliation were
on T.V., and were taken by their own reporters, not by our cameras? The world had turned its backs and closed its eyes to the dead bodies on T.V screens and those buried under the ruins in Jenin. The incursion was justified as self-defense. People in the world didn’t dare or didn’t want to believe what they were seeing. They were made to believe that everything was part of “fighting terror”. The world was upside down. The values have changed. The principles of ethics
were vanishing. Power, wealth and sophisticated military technology were the order of the day. What ruled the world was not God in heaven, but Bush and Sharon on earth.
Picture worth a thousand words, like a scene out of Schindler's List, only the victims have graduated to the victimizers. This story from the Associated Press in 2002 speaking to the extremism of the settlers, including their children who are brought up in this hate. It is not uncommon for the settlers to refer to all non-Jews as vermin, inhuman and filth, just as the Nazi's once referred to them. These sentiments are the norm with the settlers, not an exception
and form the foundation of US funded, supported and defended Israeli policy, policies directly against everything Americans believe. The following are samples of hundreds of examples of hate speech, racism and policy quotes originating from Israel we have on file: "We
must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to
rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
Israel Koenig, --"The Koenig Memorandum" "We have to kill all the Palestinians
unless they are resigned to live here as slaves."
Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
"The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ...
heads smashed against the boulders and walls." Israeli Prime Minister 1988 in a speech to Jewish settlers:
New York Times April 1, 1988
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My family and I have been living peacefully for years; we have never practiced terror or torture against anyone. We have seen war on T.V, and have suffered the atrocities of the Israeli occupation, what
justification is there in the world for the Israeli soldiers to attach my house, take hold of it for over 2 weeks, damage its furniture, steal my family's valuable objects and mess with our private life? What logic is there behind all these things? Who will care about my children's mental health after all what had happened? Who is responsible for making such suffering continue? Who is to be blamed for threatening my family's life? I feel that we Palestinians are endangered species just like the whales, the elephants or even snails. However, there is one difference between them and us: these animals are treated as "more human" by animal lovers than us. I've once seen a person cry when the whales decided to come out of the sea and commit suicide! I doubt of this person would ever cry when he sees an Israeli missile blow up the
brain or the body of a Palestinian child. What really hurts is this double standard in human feelings. Although I've seen so many pictures of Palestinians being killed in the most brutal and bizarre way, I always burst into tears when the same pictures are repeated. I have always felt a strange pain inside me, a silent killing pain. It hurts when someone is forced to see different crimes in which the killer and victim are always the same. The repeated acts of killing,
blood and pieces of dead bodies are not only suffocating me, but also paralyzing my brain. Sometimes I reach a point where I feel I should surrender and confess defeat. I sometimes feel that my life is worthless and that I am completely incapable of working, achieving and producing. It is self-torturing when someone incapable of
being a productive person because there is no clear aim of his life, when fearful thoughts of the possibility of getting killed, whether intentionally or accidentally, or having a member of my family killed or injured, or having my house hit by an Apache missile, cross my mind, I lose interest in the smallest things around me. I can lose appetite, and the desire to do my duties as a mother, a wife and as a person who wishes to live a normal life, I always thank God for
not only being alive, but also for keeping my sanity. I wish to be able to overcome the pressure and stress that I'm having. What keeps my sanity is the fact that I'm not the only person who has been facing these hardships; all the Palestinians including children, women, men and old people have been facing the same situation and are under the same pressures. I believe
that what had happened was not war against terror. It was terror in itself. Otherwise, how could taking my house by force be justified as fighting terror? I was not even consulted or asked for the keys. I wasn’t abroad. I was staying at my parent-in-law’s house next door. None of the soldiers who broke into my house apologized for what they did to my house as civilized people would do in such situations. How could destroying my furniture and tearing up the kids’
textbooks and the holy Qu'ran be considered as fighting terror? Who would justify stealing my kids’ life savings and other valuable items as fighting terror? Who can explain to me that the magazines of naked women that the soldiers left in my kids’ bedrooms were ways of fighting terror? How could using and messing with my underwear be considered an act of fighting terror? Shouldn’t such actions be considered as an attack on people’s personal life, customs, religions
and cultural beliefs? Aren’t such actions immoral and against all acceptable rules of principles and behavior in the eyes of the “civilized West”? The so-called "War against terror" is nothing but a big lie. Is it justifiable to stop war by launching another war against civilians? What is terror? What is the definition of terrorism? According to the Macmillan
dictionary: to terrorize means "to fill someone with terror by threats or acts of violence to obtain political demands". One can find the same definition in Oxford and Webster. The definitions are one, but the interpretation is various. When the Israelis hurt, it is considered terrorism on our part, but when the Palestinians hurt and suffer, everyone rushes to condemn the Palestinians, calling them the terrorists. This obvious bias and double standard behavior creates
nothing but feelings of hatred, oppression and unfairness. What hurts even worse is the behavior of the Western press, who use two groups or sets of words in their reports. When they are talking about the Palestinians, they use words like "oppressive, butchers and terrorists", but when they refer to Israelis, they use "dedicated, idealistic and democratic". What
hurts is their blindness, bias and unwillingness to understand the truth, which is that Palestinians are people living under a brutal occupation and are trying to have their independence, their own state, and use their own land. The Israelis have been working on changing such truth; they have been trying to convince the whole world that it is exactly the opposite. They always try to create a picture of themselves as the victims, and the Palestinians as occupiers who
are preventing from living peacefully. I believe that those who believe the Israeli version of the truth are blind, or liars, who will never be forgiven by history and humanity. My husband came home late and his clothes were dirty. He told me that he helped the people who came to the streets of the city and began to clean and wash the shops and streets. The children
helped in clearing the rocks and stones left after the shelling. Monday April 22, 2002 Today, in the city work such as cleaning and clearing waste and rubble continued side by side with work such as construction, rebuilding and repairing. People whose houses had been destroyed began to remove the rubble away. Shop owners whose shops or stores had been broken into, set out to fix what could be fixed and to clear the mess and ruins. Garbage men
were collecting tons of garbage and dirt from the streets of the city. There were over 200 houses that had been taken over by the soldiers during the incursion and witnessed damage more or less like that done in my house. The city center was empty of consumers and buyers and most of the shops were closed. As I was walking with Nana and Veno along the streets, we talked
to the people we knew, and listened to their stories about what had happened to them or their neighbors. A family of seven members was killed under the ruins of their house, which was shelled, by the Apache helicopter killing the man, his two sisters, his wife and his three children. The whole family died leaving two children alive to face an unknown dark future. A man was shot dead and his body was left in the streets of the city for days, and by the time the curfew was lifted, the rats had eaten parts of his body. Thirteen bodies that were temporarily buried in the garden of one of the houses were exhumed and reburied in the graveyard. The municipality workers began to
fix and restore water and electricity services to the houses and shops. NEXT
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