I learned a great deal that I didn't know from that video, Harrison, and it took me somewhere I wasn't expecting to go. Thank you. It was a most excellent video, indeed.
There were the simple yet horrible facts:
In the occupied territories, there is 65% unemployment, and 75% live below poverty line. Unimaginable numbers.
For a Palestinian, a ten minute drive takes four hours, thanks to the system of bypass roads that connects the new Israeli settlements which carve up the little bit of land left to Palestinians into tiny cells and postage stamps.
200,000 Israelis live on land captured from Palestinians in 1967 war, in violation of UN resolutions. None of them should be there.
The Palestinian don't control their own water. Some villages get two hours of water allotment per week; but they do get to stare across walls of new gated communities at the Jewish only settlements with their lush green lawns, watered, no doubt, daily.
But that's not the only occupation: the American media is also an Occupied Territory. It is an ideological occupation, and without a doubt, the most successful PR effort the world has ever seen. They had me fooled for years.
Alon Pinkas, Counsel General for Israel in NY, proudly boasts "We are currently in a conflict with the Palestinians...." and "...engaging in a successful PR campaign is part of winning that conflict."
And then there's the missing context: reporting in the US of the uprisings by Palestinians simply omits all mention that it is a revolt against four decades of military occupation; so the Palestinians look like dangerous lunatics instead of people who are resisting in any way possible being pushed off a cliff. A blurb for an MSNBC special on the "Mind of a Suicide Bomber" "...so hard for us to understand why they would be willing to sacrifice their lives in this way," says the announcer. Without a context, he's right. I wonder if he believes this nonsense, or if he's even aware of how he's hammering another nail to help seal the doors to American minds shut.
And the routine presentation of Israel as under attack and responding to defend itself, when it's really a case of the Israeli jailers going inside the prison-which is what the occupied territories are-harassing the Palestinian prisoners in their cells, and then running back out to get some US MADE-US PAID for F-16's to knock the natives back into the stone age. Poor Israeli's, forced to retailitate against their will because of another senseless "attack" which they just happened to stir up!
It all adds up, quite simply, to ethnic cleansing.
Born in Illinois, I have lived in Arizona, in Maryland, and now in the Catskills in upstate New York. Of all the places I have lived, none has ever felt more like home to me as this place does. The simple natural beauty I find all around me at almost every turn never fails to strike a deep chord within. I can understand why the native Americans held this area particularly sacred. There is a quiet but unmistakable holiness about it. Life affirmed by beauty. And I can feel a little of the shock and the loss they felt as white-skinned men came from afar and took their land away. A home and a sacred land are both very hard to have to lose.
And so I also participate a little in what's going on in Palestine today, where Home and Sacred are once again at stake before men's eyes. But we must speak up. We have to speak up. We must not let another genocide take place before us, like the cleansing of the native americans from their land, and say nothing. We must speak.
I think of scenes from the videothat speak to me most eloquently:
--the calm, bored expression on the face of an Israeli soldier as he grabs a Palestinian by the scruff of the neck and smashes his face into a metal door.
--Israeli soldiers standing on a hillside. At their feet two Palestinians. One soldier lifts his boot and kicks one of the Palestinians in the face. Another, picking up a rock the size of a cantaloupe, repeatedly pounds another seated man behind the neck with the stone. This is not Hollywood. Those are not stunt men. This is everyday life in the territories.
--Palestinian housewives, some dressed like those from Sioux City or Philadelphia, being dragged out of their homes by soldiers and standing by, watching with their arms crossed, helpless, as bulldozers knock down their homes, on their land.
--But what really got to me was part of a BBC report on the suicide bombing of a supermarket in Israel. There was the usual footage of screaming people, blooded people, body parts, torn and twisted metal and chunks of masonry. The BBC then took us to the home of the suicide bomber. We saw the grim and grieving family. And then--completely catching me by surprise with all the force of a blow to the solar plexus--I burst out sobbing as the video showed a three second clip of the suicide bomber, reading before the camera some last message to the living. This terrorist was an extraordinarily beautiful Palestinian girl of 16! It brought home to me most truly how terrible this world has become, when the fate of such beauty is not a date with a handsome boy for a picnic or a dance, but a date with death, where all she has to live for is shattered, literally, into a million pieces.
But there's much more. It's well worth the watch.
Craig S
