Simply infuriating. I cannot even begin to fathom how the Palestinians retain even the slightest equanimity.
I wonder too, what is Israeli settler life/community like? If you make violence and bullying the cornerstones of your approach to other people, if you exalt and reward cruelty and injustice, how does that play out at home? Maybe currently all that hate and aggression is focused outwardly, on the Palestinians, and a strong sense of tribe keeps it from being the norm between settlers. But maybe not, too. And what happens when the Palestinians have been exterminated or expelled and their are no others to absorb that abuse, just their fellow settlers?
ForceOfHabit, thank you for your comment and this important insight. It is something I hadn’t thought of but you are right. Settlers will often send their young boys into the homes of Palestinians to harass them because the young boys are below the age of maturity and cannot be held legally accountable. They cannot be arrested. And I have even heard of boys attacking Palestinians with knives for the same reason. This tactic is well documented. This is obviously a form of child abuse that Israelis are perpetrating against their own boys. Related to all of this, I recommend the documentary “Defamation” which you can watch online. Thank you!
Wow, I hadn't heard that about the Israeli kids. How is this not immediately recognizable to their parents as child abuse? How can they possibly believe anything good comes from this. I will watch the "Defamation" documentary.
Each of us is the hope for humanity… you, me, all of us. It depends upon how we chose to live our lives, as a blessing or a curse. Because I am struggling with despair I am making a point to listen to beautiful music (Bach being a favorite) and taking time to connect with nature even in very brief moments. As I wrote to a Palestinians friend yesterday, “If I hate, they win. If I despair, they win.” Just some thoughts. Thank you for your comment.
It is beautifully written Augusta, as Cara writes from the center of emotions which we call the "heart" as well as her intellectual and academic excellence in the use of language in the written word. I do agree with her reply to you, which is easier said then done, but in the long term, Love and Compassion will eventually overcome the evilness occurring as I write. And yes, it may get worse and possibly end in nuclear annihilation, but I think those who do survive will turn to peaceful methods and practices toward their fellow human beings and say, "Time to give peace a chance" and really turn the swords of war into plowshares.
thank you, Joy in HK! I see your comments elsewhere and am grateful for all of your online activism and for giving us concrete actions that we can take. Keep up the good work!
and my plaudits to you, cara marianna, for having the courage and the discipline to launch and sustain this remarkable and inimitable internet site. you are a hero for your proactive determination to 'speak truth to power’ and for providing a platform and window of opportunity for the rest of us to do so w/ clarion bugle-calls for solidarity among the humane.
yes, there are economic hierarchies in the west bank palestinian communities, but their social, political, and moral solidarity w/ their consociate, but more depauperate, palestinians is inviolable and intransigent. in fact, all my translators, interpretors, and helpers in the 4 refugee camps where i volunteered were highly educated palestinian university students, males and femmes, who had been birthed and raised in the west bank, and many of whom were on the cusp of graduating and moving on to pursue graduate work in multifarious fields abroad.
when we were on a USAID-funded environmental conservation project for IUCN in the hashemite kingdom of jordan [1988~’91] whence we finally had to be evacuated to cyprus when bush, sr. and blowhard blair were bombing the iraqis into the prokaryotic stage of life’s evolutionary history, a palestinian mother in the refugee camp where my bantlings and i volunteered on weekends [near our house in ferdous], asseverated that she and her husband would struggle, no matter what sacrifices they had to make, no matter the costs, to insure that their 2 children would be educated. as you too discovered, their educations were more important than any other value they embraced, save their children’s health. the father’s promulgation was that, despite their progenitors’ being deprived of their homeland and being forced by the zionists to leave their home in ramallah at the end of a gun, a home that was subsequently demolished, they escaped across the jordan river, ended up in a refugee camp north of amman, and taught their children from diaperhood that education, a well-informed brain, was the only asset they had remaining that could not be violently purloined from them except by death. palestinian parents’ sacrifices are beyond mythical.
the tormenting teenaged boys in that palestinian public school had nothing else to look forward to, nothing else to live for except their dignity, which was imbued w/ the honour of fighting back and never giving up until they too were finally dead.
gratitude and huge appreciation for your captivating and inspiring report of your journey through palestine's west bank, cara marianna.
what astonishes and utterly befuddles me is the MSM west's subserviance to the US/UK/zionazisraeli war mongers when, i presume, as journalists, they have likely travelled to depauperate countries as well, and they have seen, up close and uncomfortable, how deleterious western powers’ esurient, empire-building machinations are to the rest of the planet and its multifarious, victimized inhabitants.
who are these hideous people, especially govt bureaucrats, who hide behind their masks of putative morality and hand-wringing guises? who were their parents? how did they transmogrify from 'tabula-rasa' bairns into archdeacons of duplicity? it can’t be attributed entirely to parenting and peer-group pressures or DNA survival alleles… that conundrum-trope of nurture vs nature, eh?
the best people i have known throughout our global-nomad perigrinations have been the most impoverished and the most challenged in terms of endeavouring to fulfill their survival needs. this entrains a recent memory that i might have quondamly related to others who read your exquisite exegeses, cara marianna. if so, pardon the repetend:
when hoofing it back to the PROJECT HOPE NABLUS compound from the refugee camp’s autism centre where i was volunteering for 3 months last year [my son firth was teaching in a different refugee camp], i came upon a large group of 9 or 10 teenage palestinian boys from the high school near PHN who had surrounded and were abusing a young pre-pubescent boy... pouring garbage, feces, and other pourriture over his quivering body, prodding him w/ sticks, poking him w/ needles, whacking his ankles and knees w/ batons, w/ the poor lad struggling visibly and valiently not to dissolve into a sobbing puddle of lachrymose secretions…..
you can imagine how instinctively my raging maternal hormones shifted into super-gear, which were triggered in a nano-second. needless to convey, i barged through this bludgeoning boy-barrier, elbowing and shoving aside any fellow in my way, grabbed the young lad, pulled him along w/ me into the street, and wrapped him in an incunabulum of protection as best i could w/ my tall but skinny body, while i fiercely screamed my rage at the cruel, demonic, abusing high school boys. b/c i was a female and elderly, they, being palestinian muslims, did not dare touch my body and retaliate.
after the youngster had finally allowed himself to cry and then was becalmed a bit, i half-carried him to the PHN office where the interim director [the reg. dir. was in france on a fund-raising trip], and after hearing my narrative of what had just occurred, hassan put him in the shower, dressed him in clean clothes, gave him something to eat and drink, which he, ahmed, was too overwrought to swallow, then off we marched to the high school.
the abusers were identified, brought to the superintendent’s office, where they explained that what they had undertaken w/ this lad had become an accepted ritual among them… videlicet, that every boy on the occasion of his 12th birthday was taken across the wall, out-of-site of the school, and tormented, nay tortured, as an introductional quiddity for their soon-to-come tortures by the zioisraeli IDF. this was undertaken in order to toughen-up these young lads sufficiently to endure what the future will have in-store for them once they are rounded-up and incarcerated by the IDF after joining protest groups, or HAMAS, or the PLO, or the PNLF, or any of the other palestinian resistence groups that every palestinian fellow is expected to join post-puberty.
if a pre-pubescent lad is not thus indoctrinated, he is humiliated, branded as a wussie, and essentially banished. you see, cara, how wrong-doing against ’the other' breeds acrimony, breeds retaliatory acrimony, breeds hatred, breeds more hatred… in an interminable cycle of violence. of course, you know this from your own visceral and experiences.
Jeanie, thank you for this comment and for sharing your recent experience in the WB. Wow! What a story. These young Palestinian boys essentially have no future. So they are preparing for short lives of extreme suffering and eventual martyrdom. Of course, even in the WB there is certain class privilege. Middle and upper class Palestinians can go to university. As you must know, Palestinians are among the highest educated people in the world. They have long valued education, in part, because education is something that cannot be taken from them. I was told this again and again. Sadly, the boys in refugee camps especially have less choices. I suspect that anger and despair are rampant. Thank you again for this comment.
Thanks so much for amplifying these voices, Cara.
Diana, thank you for reading these essays and for always encouraging me onward.
You're most welcome, Cara. Thanks for posting.
Simply infuriating. I cannot even begin to fathom how the Palestinians retain even the slightest equanimity.
I wonder too, what is Israeli settler life/community like? If you make violence and bullying the cornerstones of your approach to other people, if you exalt and reward cruelty and injustice, how does that play out at home? Maybe currently all that hate and aggression is focused outwardly, on the Palestinians, and a strong sense of tribe keeps it from being the norm between settlers. But maybe not, too. And what happens when the Palestinians have been exterminated or expelled and their are no others to absorb that abuse, just their fellow settlers?
ForceOfHabit, thank you for your comment and this important insight. It is something I hadn’t thought of but you are right. Settlers will often send their young boys into the homes of Palestinians to harass them because the young boys are below the age of maturity and cannot be held legally accountable. They cannot be arrested. And I have even heard of boys attacking Palestinians with knives for the same reason. This tactic is well documented. This is obviously a form of child abuse that Israelis are perpetrating against their own boys. Related to all of this, I recommend the documentary “Defamation” which you can watch online. Thank you!
Wow, I hadn't heard that about the Israeli kids. How is this not immediately recognizable to their parents as child abuse? How can they possibly believe anything good comes from this. I will watch the "Defamation" documentary.
Beautiful written and heart-wrenching. No justice in this world. No hope for a better world. No hope for humanity. It only gets worse.
Each of us is the hope for humanity… you, me, all of us. It depends upon how we chose to live our lives, as a blessing or a curse. Because I am struggling with despair I am making a point to listen to beautiful music (Bach being a favorite) and taking time to connect with nature even in very brief moments. As I wrote to a Palestinians friend yesterday, “If I hate, they win. If I despair, they win.” Just some thoughts. Thank you for your comment.
It is beautifully written Augusta, as Cara writes from the center of emotions which we call the "heart" as well as her intellectual and academic excellence in the use of language in the written word. I do agree with her reply to you, which is easier said then done, but in the long term, Love and Compassion will eventually overcome the evilness occurring as I write. And yes, it may get worse and possibly end in nuclear annihilation, but I think those who do survive will turn to peaceful methods and practices toward their fellow human beings and say, "Time to give peace a chance" and really turn the swords of war into plowshares.
Thank you for going to Palestine, and for your reporting. Here is something I want to share with your readers, and you, if you are not aware of this.
The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a case with the ICC against 1,000 Israeli soldiers for war crimes in Gaza.
https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/perpetrators/hind-rajab-foundation-files-historic-icc-complaint-against-1000-israeli-soldiers-for-war-crimes-in-gaza
I think they might could use our help. Please read the article and join me in making a contribution. https://buy.stripe.com/cN228hbY5g7jaM84gg
thank you, Joy in HK! I see your comments elsewhere and am grateful for all of your online activism and for giving us concrete actions that we can take. Keep up the good work!
and my plaudits to you, cara marianna, for having the courage and the discipline to launch and sustain this remarkable and inimitable internet site. you are a hero for your proactive determination to 'speak truth to power’ and for providing a platform and window of opportunity for the rest of us to do so w/ clarion bugle-calls for solidarity among the humane.
yes, there are economic hierarchies in the west bank palestinian communities, but their social, political, and moral solidarity w/ their consociate, but more depauperate, palestinians is inviolable and intransigent. in fact, all my translators, interpretors, and helpers in the 4 refugee camps where i volunteered were highly educated palestinian university students, males and femmes, who had been birthed and raised in the west bank, and many of whom were on the cusp of graduating and moving on to pursue graduate work in multifarious fields abroad.
when we were on a USAID-funded environmental conservation project for IUCN in the hashemite kingdom of jordan [1988~’91] whence we finally had to be evacuated to cyprus when bush, sr. and blowhard blair were bombing the iraqis into the prokaryotic stage of life’s evolutionary history, a palestinian mother in the refugee camp where my bantlings and i volunteered on weekends [near our house in ferdous], asseverated that she and her husband would struggle, no matter what sacrifices they had to make, no matter the costs, to insure that their 2 children would be educated. as you too discovered, their educations were more important than any other value they embraced, save their children’s health. the father’s promulgation was that, despite their progenitors’ being deprived of their homeland and being forced by the zionists to leave their home in ramallah at the end of a gun, a home that was subsequently demolished, they escaped across the jordan river, ended up in a refugee camp north of amman, and taught their children from diaperhood that education, a well-informed brain, was the only asset they had remaining that could not be violently purloined from them except by death. palestinian parents’ sacrifices are beyond mythical.
the tormenting teenaged boys in that palestinian public school had nothing else to look forward to, nothing else to live for except their dignity, which was imbued w/ the honour of fighting back and never giving up until they too were finally dead.
gratitude and huge appreciation for your captivating and inspiring report of your journey through palestine's west bank, cara marianna.
what astonishes and utterly befuddles me is the MSM west's subserviance to the US/UK/zionazisraeli war mongers when, i presume, as journalists, they have likely travelled to depauperate countries as well, and they have seen, up close and uncomfortable, how deleterious western powers’ esurient, empire-building machinations are to the rest of the planet and its multifarious, victimized inhabitants.
who are these hideous people, especially govt bureaucrats, who hide behind their masks of putative morality and hand-wringing guises? who were their parents? how did they transmogrify from 'tabula-rasa' bairns into archdeacons of duplicity? it can’t be attributed entirely to parenting and peer-group pressures or DNA survival alleles… that conundrum-trope of nurture vs nature, eh?
the best people i have known throughout our global-nomad perigrinations have been the most impoverished and the most challenged in terms of endeavouring to fulfill their survival needs. this entrains a recent memory that i might have quondamly related to others who read your exquisite exegeses, cara marianna. if so, pardon the repetend:
when hoofing it back to the PROJECT HOPE NABLUS compound from the refugee camp’s autism centre where i was volunteering for 3 months last year [my son firth was teaching in a different refugee camp], i came upon a large group of 9 or 10 teenage palestinian boys from the high school near PHN who had surrounded and were abusing a young pre-pubescent boy... pouring garbage, feces, and other pourriture over his quivering body, prodding him w/ sticks, poking him w/ needles, whacking his ankles and knees w/ batons, w/ the poor lad struggling visibly and valiently not to dissolve into a sobbing puddle of lachrymose secretions…..
you can imagine how instinctively my raging maternal hormones shifted into super-gear, which were triggered in a nano-second. needless to convey, i barged through this bludgeoning boy-barrier, elbowing and shoving aside any fellow in my way, grabbed the young lad, pulled him along w/ me into the street, and wrapped him in an incunabulum of protection as best i could w/ my tall but skinny body, while i fiercely screamed my rage at the cruel, demonic, abusing high school boys. b/c i was a female and elderly, they, being palestinian muslims, did not dare touch my body and retaliate.
after the youngster had finally allowed himself to cry and then was becalmed a bit, i half-carried him to the PHN office where the interim director [the reg. dir. was in france on a fund-raising trip], and after hearing my narrative of what had just occurred, hassan put him in the shower, dressed him in clean clothes, gave him something to eat and drink, which he, ahmed, was too overwrought to swallow, then off we marched to the high school.
the abusers were identified, brought to the superintendent’s office, where they explained that what they had undertaken w/ this lad had become an accepted ritual among them… videlicet, that every boy on the occasion of his 12th birthday was taken across the wall, out-of-site of the school, and tormented, nay tortured, as an introductional quiddity for their soon-to-come tortures by the zioisraeli IDF. this was undertaken in order to toughen-up these young lads sufficiently to endure what the future will have in-store for them once they are rounded-up and incarcerated by the IDF after joining protest groups, or HAMAS, or the PLO, or the PNLF, or any of the other palestinian resistence groups that every palestinian fellow is expected to join post-puberty.
if a pre-pubescent lad is not thus indoctrinated, he is humiliated, branded as a wussie, and essentially banished. you see, cara, how wrong-doing against ’the other' breeds acrimony, breeds retaliatory acrimony, breeds hatred, breeds more hatred… in an interminable cycle of violence. of course, you know this from your own visceral and experiences.
Jeanie, thank you for this comment and for sharing your recent experience in the WB. Wow! What a story. These young Palestinian boys essentially have no future. So they are preparing for short lives of extreme suffering and eventual martyrdom. Of course, even in the WB there is certain class privilege. Middle and upper class Palestinians can go to university. As you must know, Palestinians are among the highest educated people in the world. They have long valued education, in part, because education is something that cannot be taken from them. I was told this again and again. Sadly, the boys in refugee camps especially have less choices. I suspect that anger and despair are rampant. Thank you again for this comment.