You Can't Bomb It Away
Palestinian Sense of Place
By HEATHER GRAY
Israel's bombing and reckless destabilization of Gaza is ongoing.
Yet, given the past century and the consistent abuse by Israelis, it has become clear that Israel can attempt to diminish the Palestinian claims on Palestine or weaken their resolve, but it's highly unlikely it will succeed. No matter the strength of bombs, missiles and Caterpillar bulldozers, the most potent cache of weapons that the Israelis can never destroy are the ancestral stories and culture that are rooted in the Palestinians themselves.
Probably no one says this better than contemporary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
I Come From There
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....
The land holds the stories, the history. The land holds the roots. The land embraces the ancestry of thousands of years. The Palestinian people will preserve this no matter what. This is the most powerful weapon of all. You cannot bomb it away. Middle Eastern Jews also have this history, but it's a shared history with Palestinians.
The Israelis have tried to erase the Palestinian history in any number of ways. Destruction of records is one example. Just recently in bombings in the city of Nablas, the Israelis decimated an administration building holding thousands of Palestinian documents, some more than 100 years old, of deeds and family histories connected with land. In Gale Courey Toesing's recent article "First Destroy the Archives: 9/11 Nablas" (Counterpunch July 27, 2006), she quotes
Abed Al Illah Ateereh, the director of the Ministry of the Interior in Nablus: >>>cont
Link Here
By HEATHER GRAY
Israel's bombing and reckless destabilization of Gaza is ongoing.
Yet, given the past century and the consistent abuse by Israelis, it has become clear that Israel can attempt to diminish the Palestinian claims on Palestine or weaken their resolve, but it's highly unlikely it will succeed. No matter the strength of bombs, missiles and Caterpillar bulldozers, the most potent cache of weapons that the Israelis can never destroy are the ancestral stories and culture that are rooted in the Palestinians themselves.
Probably no one says this better than contemporary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
I Come From There
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....
The land holds the stories, the history. The land holds the roots. The land embraces the ancestry of thousands of years. The Palestinian people will preserve this no matter what. This is the most powerful weapon of all. You cannot bomb it away. Middle Eastern Jews also have this history, but it's a shared history with Palestinians.
The Israelis have tried to erase the Palestinian history in any number of ways. Destruction of records is one example. Just recently in bombings in the city of Nablas, the Israelis decimated an administration building holding thousands of Palestinian documents, some more than 100 years old, of deeds and family histories connected with land. In Gale Courey Toesing's recent article "First Destroy the Archives: 9/11 Nablas" (Counterpunch July 27, 2006), she quotes
Abed Al Illah Ateereh, the director of the Ministry of the Interior in Nablus: >>>cont
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 6:18 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home