Photo: Hafez Huraini
Dear Trude,
As many readers know, I feel an incredible privilege that I work for a
website that is communicating the Palestinian experience to Americans
and the world. It’s a privilege because we have the freedom to write
about human rights atrocities without facing physical danger or arrest. A
privilege because it gives life meaning to take such a role– when so
many others have passed on that responsibility.
I felt that privilege today reading Mohammad Huraini’s account
of the settler attack on his father Hafez six days ago when his dad was
just trying to protect his lands in the South Hebron Hills.
The video of the wanton attack on a lonely villager will burn in your
mind for days. Masked settlers broke both of Hafez’s arms with sticks.
Another settler who looks a lot like a soldier shot over the heads of
Hafez and an activist friend for daring to film, then pointed the rifle
at Mohammed. The settlers then slashed the tires on the ambulance that
came to Hafez’s aid.
All with no consequences. No– Israeli soldiers arrested Hafez,
both of his arms in casts, and later raided his village of at-Tuwani in
the middle of the night and detained 15 people for resisting the
settlers.
None of the settlers has been arrested, of course. The soldiers are on the settlers’ side. Because Jewish nationalism requires the militant colonization of Palestinian land, and the killings of young Palestinians who don’t accept apartheid– almost all Israel is behind their soldiers.
Mohammad’s story reminded me of writers I have admired all my life:
Isaac Babel, Charles Dickens, Doris Lessing. They were privileged to
have an audience, and each of them understood their responsibility to
report on human rights abuses.
Lessing told the world about racial subjugation in southern Africa in
the 1950s. Dickens visited the United States in the 1840s and wrote a
book that catalogued the abuses committed by slaveholders, maimings,
beatings, mutilations. Dickens lost a lot of American readers for his
anti-slavery writings, but the decade after he died saw the Emancipation
Proclamation.
Babel told the story that most resonates with Mohammad Huraini’s: the
terrorization of Jews during the Russian pogroms in Odessa in the early
1900s. The police were in on those atrocities too. The big difference
between the antisemitic pogroms and the Israeli terrorization of
Palestine is that the occupation has gone on a lot longer, with American
complicity allowing the violence to continue– in the name of Jewish
democracy. And yet everywhere we see brave Palestinians resisting.
“Come be with us, build with us, bring nothing but will and joy,” one Palestinian resister told Mariam Barghouti this week.
We are holding up a megaphone to those voices in the U.S. Bearing
witness is a sacred duty down through human history.
Thank you for
allowing us to have that role, |