-Caveat Lector-
Imagine Suburbia Under Siege
by Laurie King-Irani*
July 13, 2001
Another hot and suffocating day.
You wake up in a home with only sporadic electricity. The water pressure
is too low to provide a good shower or bath for you or your family. The
neighboring community, armed to the teeth and keeping you and your loved
ones in its gun-sights, has sunk a well to the level of the water table of
your household; it's their resource now. Not much you can do to stop
them--you and what army?
Your children are hungry, irritable, and smelly. You try to calm them,
singing them songs while heating up some left-over coffee and listening to
news reports on a battery powered radio that promise your difficult life
is only going to get worse.
You need to get to town to buy some food and medicine. Is it safe to try
today? No. From your bullet-pocked front door, you see that heavily armed
soldiers have blockaded the intersection at the end of your street once
again. They are forbidding anyone from going in or out. Another day of
being trapped, hungry, frustrated, and anxious about your father's heart
condition, your sister's troubled pregnancy. How will you get them to the
hospital when the moment of illness or birth comes?
In the searing heat of the afternoon, you decide to take a nap and
encourage the fussy children to do the same. But no sooner do you all
begin to rest and escape into a fitful sleep from the misery and
humiliation of your daily lives than the grinding roar of the bulldozers
starts up again. The remaing trees of your family's orchards, a key
economic resource for your entire community, are being uprooted by the
neighboring community, which wants to expand its considerable living space
yet again at your expense--while also reminding you who is boss here.
Some teenaged boys cannot take it any more--the pressure, the boredom, the
uncertainty, the injustice. They are gathering to complain loudly to the
soldiers at the intersection. The soldiers grow edgy and begin to position
themselves for some action. One of the boys flings a rock, and the
explosion hanging all day in the air as a possibility is realized:
gunshots ring out, tear gas cannisters fly, shouts and screams rip through
the quiet rage and despair engulfing all of you.
In less than five minutes, one boy lies dead, three more are wounded. No
one can get them to the hospital. Will they survive their wounds? And if
they do, what sort of future awaits them in this cage? Maybe it is best to
die, after all.
The radio brings a report from a powerful leader of a foreign country
blaming you and your children for this state of affairs, calling on you
and your children to cease and desist from your violence. You have no
help, no money, no basic amenities, no weapons, and little hope. You do
have a sense of outrage and astonishment that the entire world cannot
appreciate how unfair this situation is, how outgunned and overwhelmed you
and your family are. That outrage, burning in your empty stomach, is all
that sustains you through yet another endless day....
If this were your daily, inescapble reality, in the suburbs and cities of
the USA, would you accept it? Would you expect the world to accept it?
Probably not. So why should anyone in the comfort of a US city or suburb
expect Palestinians under occupation to acquiecse to their oppression,
strangulation, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization? The next time some
talking head in the US media tells you that Palestinian violence must end,
imagine yourself in their worn and tattered shoes, and don't forget: Your
tax dollars are enabling this situation to continue.
----------
Laurie King-Irani is Freelance writer, and former Editor of Middle East
Report. She can be reached it: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
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