Posts tagged dheisheh
UPON MY RETURN TO THE US I WRITE THIS OPEN LETTER

Dear all my relatives, friends and barely acquainted friends who support the Zionist project of Israel,Please sit with me for a while, I have too many stories that scream to be told.  
A twelve year old boy picks up a stone and throws it at a fully geared soldier. The boy is sent to a prison for 20 years. Maybe bargained down to 18. His family will not be able to visit because they will not get permits to travel. 

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UNDERSTANDING MARYLAND THROUGH PALESTINE

Returning home from Palestine this week has been illuminating and challenging to see the interconnectedness between my state and the homeland of Palestinians, a place equal in size and 5,860 miles away. I have noticed striking similarities in the way that farmers here take pride in being from Maryland, raising their children and tending to crops in the same place for generations, similar to the way that Palestinian farmers claim nine centuries of heritage in one place. I feel despairing to imagine if all the farmers in my county were forcibly displaced at the rate Palestinians have been, over 95% of the indigenous population. I have also seen that Maryland has largely erased its genocide against the Native American peoples, the Iroquois-speaking tribes of my county, while Israel denies the on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

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LIVING IN (FALSE) HOPE UNDER ISRAELI OCCUPATION

How are they getting away with this? This rhetorical question dogged me for days as I learned about the intricacies of Israel's occupation of Palestine: Concrete slabs 26 feet high tearing through Palestinian neighborhoods and farmlands. More than 100 permits required for ordinary tasks like building a room in your house. Palestinian children being sentenced to five to 20 years in prison for throwing stones, a common form of protest.

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