Report from Gaza

Report From Gaza: When My Son Screams

We don’t even seem to have a right to exist or defend ourselves. That right, according to the United States, belongs to Israel alone.

Mohammed Omer

July 15, 2014   

 

 

A damaged house in Deir El-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, July 14, 2014 (Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

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We talk, looking for distraction, wondering how the Israelis are doing on the other side of the segregation wall. They are free to come and go as they please without restrictions. Do they feel safe, with their warning sirens and bomb shelters to hide in? They don’t have to worry about warships pounding their homes, tanks smashing through their streets, bulldozers destroying their homes, jet fighters dropping bombs on their neighborhood or drones hunting them down. Israel has the fourth-most-powerful military in the world, with full army, navy and air force as well as their Iron Dome, which is quite effective against the homemade rockets lobbed from Gaza. We have no navy, no air force and no army. We have no checkpoints for security. We don’t even seem to have a right to exist or defend ourselves. That right, according to the United States, seems reserved for Israel and Israel alone.

Pondering such, the hypocrisy elevates cognitive dissonance, the reality of this situation, to new heights. We’re a mere hour’s drive from most major cities in Israel, yet we live in a completely different world. Gaza is the Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw ghettos rolled into one. We cannot leave or enter without Israel’s permission. Israel tells us what we are allowed to eat, raids at will and often, decides which products we’re allowed to have, down to toilet paper, sugar and cinderblock. It arrests our children, fathers and mothers, and can hold them as long as it wants. Its snipers amuse themselves at the expense of our children. How can Israeli society not know what we are suffering or what they’re paying to have done to us? Didn’t their parents, grandparents, go through the same horror before coming to Palestine? Wasn’t Zionism created to prevent these horrors from occurring ever again… to any people?

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EXTRACT ONLY
FULL ARTICAL - SOURCE - The Nation - here.

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COMMENT

Above struck me as a very powerful article from the Palestinian civilian perspective.