Closing Our Eyes

Sometimes I look around and wonder, "How the hell are we living like this?" I'm writing at this moment because I feel so overwhelmed. With every ounce of effort, we try to maintain some semblance of normalcy in our lives...university and homework, grocery shopping, picking the kids up from school. But we are rats in a cage under a lethal experiment and there is really nothing normal about this and there never ever should be.

It can be easy in Ramallah to forget about the cage. Sometimes you don't feel the occupation because you don't see it. I had my students write on Silwan, a neighborhood in Jerusalem, where 88 houses in which 1,500 people live, are under demolition orders. Ramallah was supposed to participate with all of Palestine in a general strike. I asked the students to tell me why there was a strike and what they were doing. A few participated in demonstrations, but most blamed the weather and their sense of powerlessness for their choice to abstain. We have the luxury here to ignore, to choose not to participate, but most in Palestine do not have this luxury because guns, soldiers, tanks, and violence are daily realities.