What’s happening is something, again, I find inexcusable. Yes, I’ve already resolved that a number of occurances have directly contributed to this stupidity. The percentage of unemployed Palestinians is nearly 50%. The difficulty for Palestinian students to attend school is at an all-time high…the Israeli government made sur e of that with its checkpoints, road blocks, apartheid wall and constant barrage of harassments. The desperation is festering within a tiny nation of people who were punished through financial strangulation. The withholding of much needed funds hit regular Palestinians harder than any American media corporation or politician would care to admit.
My aunt, for example, is not a member of any militia. She’s a nurse. When I visited her last summer in Palestine, the Palestinian government could not pay her because the world held funds that supported jobs that, surprise surprise, the government paid. So she worked for free because doctors and nurses can’t abandon their patients, even if the world effortlessly decides it’s necessary to abandon Palestine. The recent decision the American government made to release these funds to Palestinians only frustrates me further because it proves these funds people used to survive on were unnecessarily withheld. It proves that the ability to get these funds in the “right hands” was always an option.But they wanted to make a point. I think the starving families got that point ages ago. But hunger does a funny thing to you, it makes you lose interest in conceding. When feeding your family is the only thing on your mind, conceding is the last thing you want, or care, to do.
So there they were; jobless, uneducated, starving, frustrated and still not free.
Was turning on one another inevitable? I happen to believe it wasn’t. I would think this unique situation would have only brought these compatriots closer together. I would have thought that the common goal of freedom would have kept them, even under the strains of the newest hardships, united.
I don’t even recognize these people who call themselves Palestinians. I don’t understand these men locked in a power struggle. It’s as if they aren’t in that region I lived in for five years. It’s like some parallel universe that was once a juxtaposition of my best and worst memories. But I could never fault another Palestinian for my worst memories. It was always “if only the Israeli government didn’t occupy us…if only we had a free homeland.” But how can we be thinking of freedom and killing one another? The insanity of their actions leaves me numb with anger.
When I was younger and so miserable with frustration at the Israeli occupation, I used to ask myself if it would have been easier to never have been born a Palestinian. How lucky would it have been if I had been born a descendant of some free people who never had to worry about whether some foreign military would deny me access to school or jail my relatives for political reasons, or no reason at all. But I answered my own question by asking myself whether or not being a Palestinian would have allowed me to sympathize with others who were oppressed based on prejudices and corrupt politics as much as I do. It forced me to care for everyone, because I knew how extremely crucial it felt to be cared about by others who didn’t necessarily need to care . I knew that our cause was a noble one. I knew that justice was on our side, even if freedom wasn’t.
And it still is. It will not be until we gain freedom that our work is done. And nobility in our cause was never at question. In spite of the Israeli indignities, we survived through pride. But now I question whether we can gain our freedom through this very dignity we strived to maintain. A few Palestinians seem to have lost sight of this goal, and, as difficult as it has been to comprehend, they seem oblivious to shattering national pride with every gun aimed, bullet fired and brother killed. Being a Palestinian was never easy, but being proud of being Palestinian used to be a lot easier.
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