Everything in Israel is determined by its obsession with security. It is a nation that sees itself as forever victorious, forever frightened, and forever in the right. It has been victorious, and frightened, for sixty years. Always, whether fighting or negotiating, it enjoys the support of the only superpower in today’s world, as well as of all the European states. It also enjoys the secret collusion of twenty debased Arab regimes. It is a state that possesses more than two hundred nuclear warheads, has erected more than six hundred barriers and checkpoints, has built around us a wall 780 kilometers long, detains more than eleven thousand prisoners, controls all borders and crossing points leading to our country by land, sea, and air, and frames its laws with reference to a permanent philosophy that its victories do not change, a philosophy whose core is this mighty state’s fear… of us.
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Here is a truly frightening state. The Israeli military pilot climbs the skies over any Palestinian city and flies his intimidating F-16 or Apache with as much peace of mind as if he were piloting a Swissair or an Air France plane, and releases his cluster, fragmentation, and phosphorus bombs and aims his ‘smart’ rockets at any target he wishes. The city is fair game, an easy target spread out beneath him. The Palestinians do not have anti-aircraft weapons. The pilot has become a deadly sky and we a murdered earth. The pilot returns safe to his wife or girlfriend in Tel Aviv and talks to her of his ‘victory’ over the Palestinians! Despite this, Israel behaves like a state that is truly terrified and fills the world with cries that its existence is threatened. Could Orwell have imagined a more flagrant abuse of language than this?
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The crossing point is the place where everyone is afraid for everyone else, a place of ambiguities that wear down the nerves. Here decisions are made that no one explains to you and procedures whose nature and extent you do not know are applied to you by human beings against whose authority there is no appeal. Here crouches a well-muscled, sharp-eyed wolf, a wolf that may leap at you with open jaws or pass you by to savage your neighbor in the line, when you barely have time to rejoice in your own escape before grieving that he has pounced on another. And you can’t be sure he won’t pounce on you until you’re safely out of the place.
The crossing point nullifies the fatherhood of fathers, the motherhood of mothers, the friendship of friends, and the love of lovers. Here it is difficult to practice tenderness. Here the possibility of solidarity and rescue are negated. Here I can neither help my son nor protect him as a father.
Dictatorship, like the Occupation, nullifies fatherhood, motherhood, friendship, and love. I ask myself how many times do I have to feel powerless to protect the ones I love.
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One of the Occupation’s crimes is to compel people to wait. To wait at crossing points, borders, and checkpoints. To wait while permissions and permits are issued. To wait for the hours of opening and closing and of the curfew and its lifting. To wait for the hellish interrogation to end. To wait for the prison sentence to end. To wait for the electricity to come back on and for the water to come back on. To wait for all the dates and extensions to dates set for negotiation by the mysterious power that holds the Authority in its grip through the permanent concealing of its intentions. In addition and before all, to be forced to spend their lives waiting, year after year and generation after generation, for the Occupation itself to disappear.
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More here.