Posts tagged delegation 62
UNTITLED: A POEM

You can stop the people's imaginations, their voices crying for justice, no matter how hard you try, you cannot hide the truth from the sun / You cannot steal the love from the heart that will be pierced for the freedom of Falastin, today, tomorrow, and the next day, / when the people of the land and the land of the people here in God's sight will forever remain.

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ART AS TORTURE (ART AS SURVIVAL)

At Al-Fara'a prison, a child was forced to paint a mural for the enjoyment of his captors, his torturers. This beautiful talent he had was co-opted and used as an instrument of his torture alongside humiliation, sleep deprivation, confinement, and much worse. So he painted his village as he remembered it, as he imagined it, on a wall in the dining hall where the Israeli officers who held him and other captive children ate their meals in between torturing the children in this prison.

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UPON MY RETURN TO THE US I WRITE THIS OPEN LETTER

Dear all my relatives, friends and barely acquainted friends who support the Zionist project of Israel,Please sit with me for a while, I have too many stories that scream to be told.  
A twelve year old boy picks up a stone and throws it at a fully geared soldier. The boy is sent to a prison for 20 years. Maybe bargained down to 18. His family will not be able to visit because they will not get permits to travel. 

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UNDERSTANDING MARYLAND THROUGH PALESTINE

Returning home from Palestine this week has been illuminating and challenging to see the interconnectedness between my state and the homeland of Palestinians, a place equal in size and 5,860 miles away. I have noticed striking similarities in the way that farmers here take pride in being from Maryland, raising their children and tending to crops in the same place for generations, similar to the way that Palestinian farmers claim nine centuries of heritage in one place. I feel despairing to imagine if all the farmers in my county were forcibly displaced at the rate Palestinians have been, over 95% of the indigenous population. I have also seen that Maryland has largely erased its genocide against the Native American peoples, the Iroquois-speaking tribes of my county, while Israel denies the on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

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LIVING IN (FALSE) HOPE UNDER ISRAELI OCCUPATION

How are they getting away with this? This rhetorical question dogged me for days as I learned about the intricacies of Israel's occupation of Palestine: Concrete slabs 26 feet high tearing through Palestinian neighborhoods and farmlands. More than 100 permits required for ordinary tasks like building a room in your house. Palestinian children being sentenced to five to 20 years in prison for throwing stones, a common form of protest.

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RE-ALIGNMENT

I think that the occupation exists in part because of the Jewish community’s historically-justified fear of annihilation. That fear has led the Jewish community to align itself with empire, militarism, and white supremacy. Those tendencies and ideologies have never been safe havens for Jews. We need a movement that will allow Jews to feel safe, that will recognize their fears, and that will show them how much we have to gain by realigning ourselves with our values and with oppressed communities around the world, starting with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. 

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"THE ROOM"

It felt like something out of a bad cliche spy movie.  I walk up to the passport control window super nervous on the inside but trying to hold it together on the outside when the passport control lady barely looks at my passport before she asked me if I was with the group. I answered yes and was swiftly taken to a holding room where most of the members of my group were being detained.

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