"It was a long time coming yeah, a long time comin"
2008-03-06, 10:59 p.m.

About the only thing I did today was go down to southwestern with dear Kalyn, and hear Ibtisam Bakar and Mark Braverman (sp?) speak. It was a truly wonderful experience, and very inspiring, if unnecessarily long. Yes, there, there exists too much of a good thing at times.

I kept looking at Ibtisam like she was a crazy woman. Think new york beatnick in the style of a painters cap wearing bob marley. Her clothes even echoed a worn out slam poet of the 80's. The women's in her 40's and certainly dressed like it. Her speech was contradictory and waffled from one unmerited topic to the next with no apparent link other than the words flowing out of her mouth strung together like a 5 year olds beaded necklace, each bead as bright as the last with no apparent logical connection. But her stance, the way she carried her voice, her contradictions, her 1980's painters cap, and pants four sizes to big, was stripped away when she stopped talking, when she looked at you, and paused with the stance of palestinian, the fury and rage of a palestinian. Her Jamacian-From-New-York accent would keep anyone from guessing she was palestinian, her gaunt face, and bony features, her deep set eyes glowing like a wild beasts would never have pointed a finger at her ancestry. Her loose hair, straight and wispy doesn't carry any of the weight arab hair does, nor does it tumble in the kinks and waves of my people. I would have placed her as european maybe turkish. But when she speaks she is Palestinian. It is not her words, her topic, it is her jumping passionately from one mentally profane topic to the next, her tone of voice carries words that inspire and hold up those around her, persuading them, enticing them into her web like a spider calling to her prey assuring them of a new world order. One who speaks arabic can not help that their minds have been trained to work like the ancient warrior poets of our legacy.
But listen carefully and in her speech you see the wounds of a people searching for something greater than themselves, a return to when we were the only civilization carrying the classical skepticism and learning, the first people to have books and use them, the people who invented math and whose poetry till today sets a standard for the rest of the world. Longing for our past because we are now a people so persecuted by others, that we think this is our lot in life, and that instead of carrying our own banners, we must carry the banners of a safer ethnicity, a safer country. I know these people. They only tote their origin when it is safe, beneficial. In private they are stripped of pretenses and in their head they speak arabic, but in public it is english. No one can say that a palestinian isn't proud to be a palestinian. But when everyone in the world says your bad, who are you to say you're good?
Yes Ibtasim, it is your journey and your responsibility to fix your broken foundation, your broken roots. It is your responsibility to remove yourself from the shield of the victim. But this does not mean we can turn those who persecute us into victims either. If we are responsible for our lives being written in blood, then we will hold those who have martyred us responsible for our deaths, our broken homes, and broken families.

You think your mother is the only one who bares the scares of occupation? It started with our grandmothers ibtisam. It is my mother, like your mother, like my cousin's mother, who bares the scars of a broken womb. When men were out hunting, when they left to tend to the cattle, we bred the land. We stayed home and tilled the land, and spoke with it long before our men. When we lost our land Ibtisam, we lost what it meant to be women of the holy land.
The Zionist movement thought it would be so easy to rid themselves of us, and we have gone nowhere because our women breed and are so cold they do not attach to their children because they are willing to lose them, to martyr them, if only they can speak to their olive groves again.

They see their husbands fathers and sons in jail for no reason every day, and they say "in the name of the cause" because they would cut out their own heart to lay their hand in the loose soil of their mothers once again.

So do not say I must empathize with the wounded who are wounding. Let them fix their broken lives, let them mend their broken hearts, let Israels sky rocketing rates of depression and suicide continue to rise as they send their young to camps where they are not slaughtered, but worse, dehumanized and humiliated in army regala, killing people crying for freedom, and working day after day to make themselves blind to what they are doing at 18 years old, when they should be learning, not opressing what is right and true in this world. Let them eat themselves from the inside out living with the fact their government says democracy and practices something else. Those who survive will hold hands with their Palestinian brothers and sisters, and we will welcome them with open arms.

And in the mean time Ibtisam, you and I will keep our Palestinian voices and lift them so that each and every person can hear them. This is how we will, like flowers drawing the bees, bring them to see what wrongs they commit against a proud and ancient people and force them to listen. Truth can not be masked, only hidden and then uncovered.
And those who survive knowing what they've done, they will join with us, and they too will stand with us in pride, and all the glory of what it means to be Arab.

Those who do not survive will not be on MY shoulders. They will not be MY problem. I have no reason to empathize with them. They have chosen to slowly rot and only god can save them.