Dear Friends,
I have a dilemma.
I know you’re all busy and can’t read several reports a day, but I’m afraid that nobody knows how many people are dying in Palestine every day. It saddens me and angers me to know that the Israeli army is literally getting away with murder day after day, hour after hour, and most people don’t pay attention. There are too few journalists and internationals in the area, but the ones who are here are carefully documenting the events, and I receive many accounts each day of little girls shot dead while sitting at their desks in school, boys dead because they’re on the wrong street at the wrong time, indiscriminate shooting and shelling of neighborhoods, and more. I read these reports and I think, “I can’t send them all, nobody will read them.” But then I know there still exists the myth that the Israeli army only kills ‘militants’ (whatever that means). The girl sitting at her desk was an accident, I suppose they’d say, but how many thousands of accidents must there be before we change our language and our consciousness? The old woman shot in Hares last month was ‘an accident’ also, and besides, says the army, it hasn’t even been proven that we’re the ones who shot her. How much history, or present reality, can be written and re-written before the world wakes up?
So I worry that if I only send one report every once in a while, or if I only send what I see with my own eyes, you’ll think, “Oh, that’s the exception.” After all, you do receive news of every Israeli killed. So maybe you assume that you also receive news of all the Palestinians killed, or at least the big invasions. In this past 6 months between the suicide bombing in March and the one in Beer Sheva last week, which the media is referring to as a ‘lull’ in violence, approximately 400 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israeli army. 400! But of course I can’t send reports of them all. The truth is too much to accept, I think. Unfortunately, Palestinians are forced into acceptance every day.
Why am I writing this today? It hits me harder, I suppose, on a day when the army has invaded our village twice: the first time, breaking the door of the school’s courtyard and throwing tear gas and sound bombs at the children, and the second time throwing sound bombs and shooting live ammunition on the streets of Hares. How many times can we chase the army through the village trying to take pictures and get them to stop what they’re doing? How many times can we call our Israeli friends and ask them to call army officials to inquire about the army’s terrorism of these small villages?
I think it’s possible that our presence here still does something, that if the army sees us, it will mean the difference between shooting to kill and the simple everyday terrorism that they’re so fond of. The problem is that there are too few of us, and we’re in too few places. Palestine needs several thousand human rights observers, at the very least to try to reduce the number of deaths until the rest of the world wakes up to this craziness.
Many Palestinians have told me that if the rest of the world simply backed off, Israelis and Palestinians would be forced to solve this on their own. And even that they could. Of course, the power differential between them is still huge, but if the backing off of the rest of the world meant an end to US funding to Israel ($15 million per day, mostly to the military), there’s no way Israel could continue what it’s doing. This doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, however, so it’s our responsibility as US citizens to engage.
What else can I say? I have no hope to offer you today, but if you have any for me, feel free to send it. And for those of you who are older and wiser and have lived and worked through more human-caused disasters, I welcome any lessons in patience or effectiveness. All I can think of to do now is to make sure the people I know will never be able to say, “I didn’t know.”
Love to all,
Hannah
