I’m done with this shit. I’m done with walking on eggshells when I talk to my Jewish friends about Palestine. I’m done with listening to the myriad of personal prerogatives from every conceivable Muslim and Christian Arab Levantine sect. And I’m especially done with any Biblical/Quranic/Talmudic references justifying violence against one tribe or another. I’m done with Jews saying everything is about “security”. It isn’t. I’m done with Palestinians blaming everything on Israel. I’m done with it!
All of you and everyone is to blame. The silent, the vocal, the violent, and the peaceful. They all have a hand in this mess, which will never be solved, and which will be our mutual undoing. The settlers and the militants are a mirror of one another’s tribally driven rage. Another day, another time I will get into the history of the conflict, and let the reader parse blame based on facts, but right now, it’s visceral, and urgent, and it’s everyone’s fault. But right now, I want to speak to the militant political Leaders. As a Kaghakatzi Armenian. As the grand-daughter of genocide survivors. As a member of a family who almost lost everything in the Naqba. The cousin, through marriage, of this man. We need to talk.
Hamas- Meet me at Camera 2:
Fuck you. Fuck you and your Machiavellian obsession with using your own people’s deaths as a bargaining chip on the international stage. Martyrs? They’re not martyrs. They’re people- men, women, and children, who after a whole lifetime of suffering are left to become hamburger because you don’t have the common sense God gave a kitchen table to realize that no one- NO ONE- is going to question Israel if you’re bombing civilian suburbs with the military equivalent of spit balls.
You wanna show how tough you are? Why not employ some brains, establish an actual military force, declare war on your occupiers, and go after Israel’s military targets? You need to wake up and realize that this experiment in copying Algeria’s model has failed, because Israel is not France, nor is it’s main supplier of arms and goodwill- the United States. It failed in the 60’s. We lost Jerusalem. It failed in the 70’s. We became permanently occupied, and stoked a massive civil war in Lebanon that lasted for 15 years.
There is very little empathy for our people right now thanks to your proclivity for unzipping your trousers and waggling your dicks around. You want the blockade to end? (Don’t we all?) You need Clinton and Carter and Obama to be able to openly empathize and put pressure on Israel. You need Lieberman and Netanyahu to sound crazier than you. On your head is the lives of all those children who died because you couldn’t find any other solution to your people’s problems-my people’s problems- other than throwing stones at the Bull in the room.
Israel, meet me at Camera 3:
You had your chance decades ago to make peace with the far more sensible, Christian-led secular socialists. But no. You didn’t give up what you promised in the peace accords. You didn’t withdraw from the Occupied Territories and grant Palestine statehood, so this is what you’re left with: a completely irrelevant, aging and corrupt Fatah party to your east and Hamas (egged on by Islamic Jihad) to your west. Good luck with that. Every child that is born in Palestine only knows the Jewish people as occupiers and as instruments of their starvation and captivity. The generation who remembers peaceful co-existence of different tribes/religious sects is dying off.
Every action of evil will only serve to make your people’s situation more precarious. It is for your own safety and survival that peace and reconciliation is the only option. This friar, win-lose attitude has got to stop; and you need to remember that in every way- those neighbors of yours are Semites as well. Collective punishment of the innocent, bombing the shit out of residential neighborhoods, forced relocations, the imprisonment of intellectuals, taking away every human decency of your perceived enemy (who is your cousin in all reality), calling Palestinians the Yiddish equivalent of the n-word, bedbugs, cockroaches, and encouraging your citizens to take the property of the other…well- that’s all very fucking familiar, isn’t it? I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on you either.
As for Lieberman and Netanyahu, Elohim is a just God. Just look at Sharon. I’m sure he and the Big Guy have had lots of time to talk about his path in life while he has been in and out of his vegetative state.
Back in ’96 or ’97, my mother was listening to a speech Netanyahu gave that was on CNN, and threw her glass of water at the TV, cursing in Arabic and Armenian. She turned to me, threw up her arms and said, “You know what? Let them all go kill each other. Let them all go fuck themselves. The Devil is laughing at all of us.”
Image: Wikimedia Commons
