I SAW PALESTINE

I saw Palestine today.  Endless foothills without many signs of life.  I can tell that someone lives there because the hills have been sculpted like steps leading to somewhere. 

It looks like a massive undertaking, carving steps from bottom to top, the full circumference of the foothill of a mountain.  The horizontal parts of the steps are wide enough to plant rows of olive trees or orange trees or any other crop.  The shorter, vertical part of the step goes up to another level for planting.  This goes on and on until it reaches the top. 

At the top of this very large hill is a small wooden home, 2 caves, 2 outhouses made out of scraps of wood, a cow and a horse, two scrawny dogs and a litter of pups.  Most importantly, there is a family of six that work the land and care for each other.

Half of the surface of the top of the hill has been plowed flat and planted with olive trees.  There are rocks everywhere.  So many rocks that I can barely see the soil through the rocks.  It seems like an unlikely place for anything to grow, but life is good and things do grow and food is plentiful.

This one hundred-acre piece of land is everything to this family.  They organize their lives around this land.  This land brings forth their food supply.

This Palestine I am describing is a rare look at the way Palestinians have lived for hundreds of years.  This is a unique family that has fought hard to maintain this life.

The problem is that someone else wants this land that has been in their family for many generations.  An army of Zionists, hundreds of Israeli settlers, have set up hostile camps the next hills over, surrounding the family’s hill.

The Zionist battle banner is a 100-foot tall flag with the star of David on it.  The flag is facing the family.  Zionists have uprooted hundreds of family olive trees.  They have blocked the road leading to their home and their land.  Israeli settlers have poisoned the land and attacked family members with one objective in mind; drive them off and steal their land.

This is Palestine today and for the last hundred years.  Most Palestinian land has been stolen by the Israeli government and settlers.  The Israeli government is working out laws and tactics to take the rest.

The star of David banner reminds me of the David and Goliath analogy that Israel uses to rationalize their assault on the Palestinian people.  Poor little Israel (David) against this overwhelmingly powerful Arab army (Goliath).

Looking at this family of 6 Palestinians on a hill surrounded by hundreds of Zionist settlers preparing to steal their land exposes the truth about who is the David and who is the Goliath in this picture.

We just left the house of Nomika, a Jewish lady in Sderot, a kibbutz close to Gaza.  Her Kibbutz has had many Hamas rockets rain down on it, yet she refuses to let that destroy her humanity.  She says that “when you stop seeing the other as a human being, you stop being a human being yourself.”  Nomika’s parting words were “my deepest felt goal is to make the invisible visible.”

In the United States, the masses don’t have a clue about what is going on in Palestine or that the United States government is paying for it.  A major part of our job as we return to the United States and Canada is to make visible the Palestine of today before the Zionist state of Israel completely erases the Palestinian civilization.