Imagine being forbidden from walking out the front door of your home. Imagine not being able to visit your family who live 20km away because you need a permit to do so. Imagine being violently attacked in your own home, on your own land and it is you and not your attackers who are arrested. Imagine knowing your 13 year old son could be arrested for no reason. Imagine having to cross a checkpoint every day to get to work or school or college, knowing that you have to accept whatever dehumanising treatment is directed at you because you have to get to where you need to go. Imagine watching a nine foot concrete wall spring up to divide your community in two. Imagine watching new highways being built and knowing you are not allowed to drive on them. Imagine soldiers throwing tear gas into your home in the middle of the night and dragging your father away. Imagine watching your home be demolished for the fifth time. Imagine watching settlers move on to land that does not belong to them, and watching them get the electricity, water and protection that you cannot access on your own land. Imagine being told constantly that you are a threat, a terrorist, that your identity does not exist, that your humanity is illegitimate, that your fundamental human rights do not matter. Imagine living cut off from your land, your people, your place. Imagine watching your friends, family and neighbours be arrested, beaten, and killed. Imagine knowing that there is no one defending you but yourselves.
This is daily life for the millions of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Palestine is ancient and beautiful and vibrant. Palestinians are hospitable and engaging, with a wonderfully dark sense of humour. I was amazed at the indefatigable spirit and sheer grit of the people and communities we met. Life is being made unbearable for them. Every move, every decision, every basic aspect of their life is controlled.
It took me a while to wrap my head around how the social and political injustices are etched into the landscape all around you. Driving past Beduoin villages all designated as ‘illegal’ and marked for demolition, which do not have access to the water or electricity grid, while up the road a vineyard sits on stolen Palestinian land, with a perimeter fence, security cameras and a full irrigation system. Our driver telling us that the reason he was late picking us up was because his car was confiscated at a checkpoint. Walking down a street in Hebron, a Palestinian city, where I, an Irish person, can walk but where Palestinians cannot walk. Walking past rows and rows of shut up shops and abandoned market places in Hebron, all hollowed out because they are on streets where Palestinians are not allowed to operate shops. Where people once traded spices, fruit, camels, clothes, ceramics just like in any thriving Arab city, there is only silence, crumbling buildings and welded shut doorways. Streets stripped of their people, their community, their spirit. The ugly concrete wall snaking its way through communities, cutting people off from resources, employment, education, each other. Israeli flags flying over settler houses in the middle of the Arab quarter in East Jerusalem. Tear gas cannisters littering the roof of a community centre in Bethlehem, a place where children and young people manage a community garden. ‘Made in the USA’ is clearly printed on these canisters. A wall mural bears the names of over 160 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military in 2014 alone. Tear gas stings my nose and eyes, fired by Israeli soldiers in a fully armoured truck, at a few kids with slingshots.
In all the people I met, I saw resistance, determination, fierce pride and a deep sense of place. They are pushed to breaking point daily, but they refuse to be broken. Speaking to 12 year olds who were full of fire and spirit and sass one minute, and then talking about how they don’t feel safe either in their homes or on the streets because they are in constant fear of an attack from the military the next. For all their spirit and fight, it is so deeply unfair that these kids cannot just be kids. It is so unfair that their lives are marred by violence and oppression, trauma and grief, simply because of who they are. There is no justice in the need to constantly resist. There is no justice in a 19 year old saying ‘I don’t think about the future’. There is no justice in the constant denial of who you are and the relentless efforts to tear apart your home, your community, your people.
I have never seen such stark, systematically inflicted injustice as I did in Palestine. As more and more Palestinians are squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces, the illegal occupation becomes more profitable and more entrenched. As I listened to the the stories shared with me and as I slowly absorbed the landscape and streetscapes around me – walls brushing up against Palestinian homes, settlers taking over grazing land, people prevented from moving where they want, when they want, people attacked with impunity and arrested for no reason, potential smothered and livelihoods destroyed – I realised that I was witnessing the slow, and deliberate, physical and social suffocation of an entire people that has been playing out since the Nakba.
Injustice is the scaffolding of systems designed to place the lives of some people above those of others. It is a denial of agency and a violation of rights. It is telling one child that their dreams matter and another that theirs don’t. It is denying one identity but not another. It is about who gets to feel safe and protected, who gets to make decisions for themselves and for others. It is stifled hopes and endless frustrations and hardships simply because of who you are. It is not being allowed to be who you are in the place you call home. It is watching your land, your culture, your people, being slowly erased while the world watches.
Injustice is not some abstract concept. It is a feeling; the feeling of fear, constant worry, no control and no power. It is a smell; of tear gas, burning olive trees, the sweat of bodies packed into a crowded checkpoint. It is a sound; of helicopters, JCBs, rubber bullets, heavy boots.
I was in awe at the strength and resilience of Palestinians, but far greater than this was a feeling that in a just world there would be no need for such strength and resilience. In a just world the Palestinian people would have their rights realised, including the right to self determination, and Palestinian children would have childhoods not defined by oppression and struggle.
Words seem so wholly inadequate, jumbled around in my head and in my heart with all of the thoughts and feelings that I am tying to unravel.
An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.
My heart is sore and heavy and my soul is fucking mad as hell.
Cosa Siúlacha 