Uprooting

The Israelis were the masters of the world's media, ahead of the Arabs by incalculable distances. During the defeat of 1967, they made us the mockers of the West. After the image of the weak and defeated, they created of the Arab the image of the brutal terrorist. In the propaganda and media arena, the Arabs seemed already defeated, including the fact that we sometimes contributed to consolidating and confirming that image through ignorant or suspicious people.

The only time the Israelis lost the media battle in advance was in Gaza. At first, the Israelis seemed lost, broken, and could be defeated, then they appeared in the form of a savage who would not stop bombing women and children, displacing millions of people, starving them, despising international laws and standards, and annihilating rescue, treatment, and sanitation systems, and confronting diseases and epidemics.

Israel has created, without interruption, a hell that humanity has never witnessed before. It became impossible for Israel to defend what it was doing. After two months of massacres, the machine tries to restore its previous work and role, but everything cries funny in a forest of wailing. Writers and journalists of the Zionist movement write about atrocities and individual cases, compared to the thousands who are displaced and killed every day. There are no words to describe the Israeli brutality, and no words can describe the Palestinian injuries and suffering and the madness of the Israeli executioner.

This time, Israeli propaganda had better hide. Everything seemed trivial, as for its major crimes. Stories crafted in the old fashioned way, true or fabricated, cannot equal a 50-second scene of the collapse of a building, or two, or a street, or a neighborhood, or a city. Adding to the horror of the destroyed cities is the announcement of the American “air bridge” accompanying the demolition planes. Or Israel's complaint about the United Nations' bias in favor of the people of Gaza. Imagine that Israel is the one complaining! And imagine who?!

The hotel management where I live informed me that I had to move from room to room. This means that I pack and then unpack my belongings and books. This is hard work for me, but I discovered that the hardest part is the idea of uprooting. What is even more cruel is the interference of a foreign element in your life and program against your will. And all this depression and this anger and the feeling of uprooting because of moving from room to room, with all respect, with everyone’s help, and with everyone’s apology.

Man despises himself as he watches Gazans being uprooted from their homes to the streets, from north to south, from misery to death.

About two million people, at least, were forcibly uprooted and thrown out into the open, but we quickly set up camps for them. We are the scourge of the camps. Every disaster and calamity has a camp. Always a temporary camp. Then it becomes permanent. Then the camp becomes home, waiting for a new camp.