I think the word ???self-defense??? should be redefined. Imagine if someone comes to your home, kills your children, locks you inside the bathroom, and declare that the property is his now! As desperate as you are, you open a hole into the exterior wall to have your hand reaching food, water, and a stone to defend yourself when needed. Unluckily, the invader discovers the whole, cuts your hand, tears down the bathroom over your head, and goes all around the neighborhood saying he???s the victim. Worst, your neighbors who know the truth consent his right to self-defense. This is the story of the Palestinian people. It???s not a thousand-year story, as some people think. It is happening since 1948 when Israelis founded their state on the Palestinian land, and the chapters of Palestinian misery are continuously written under the title Israel???s right to self-defense.
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Waiting For The Ceasefire
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Both the Gadlili mourners and the Batran mourners joined together bearing the victims on their shoulders in a mass procession to the cemetery, located on a knoll just outside the refugee camp. The cemetery long since filled up, so the gravediggers had to open old graves to find room to put these new ones on top of the old ones. They pried open one crypt but found a woman there (judging from the hair), and closed it again—unrelated female and male victims may not lie together. When the mourning parties arrived, the entire cemetery teemed with people, and a sound truck blared with prayers.
Bad as it may be, most of Gaza's 1 million people will of course survive. The bombing was heavy Saturday night and then suddenly ceased just around the time of the late-night declaration by Israel. That does not necessarily mean there still won't be victims. This is especially true of the children who have endured night after night of terror. Psychologist Hasan Zeyada, head of the Gaza Community Mental Health Center, says more than half of the children may end up with posttraumatic-stress disorder, either from what they have seen and heard, or from watching the horrific cinema verité on Palestinian television. He ticks off the symptoms: "clinging behavior, regression, bedwetting, re-experience and flashbacks, intrusive memories and dreams," and, worst of all in a way, "disappointment in parents unable to protect them."
Our host Hassan says all his three children now climb in bed with their parents, which they hadn't done in years. His son Abdullah, 14, came to him half way through all this and handed him a letter, which he had carefully and beautifully written out. In it the boy pleas formally with his father to "remember me when I am dead, and promise to bury me near Grandmother and Grandfather, and please visit my grave every week." The father wept for half an hour after reading it, he says. Abdullah, his 10-year-old son, one long night when the bombing was particularly bad, held his mother and said "please watch my eyes and make sure I don't go to sleep, mama," as Hassan related it. "He was afraid he would die and not wake up."
With Joanna Chen in Israel
© 2009
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