Why Should It Be This Way?

The situation is bad but, believe me, it IS going to get worse.. yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Why? Because the world ALLOWS IT TO! That’s why. Thanks to a world that has grown totally numb. As much as I earnestly try, I just can’t understand how the world tolerates Israel’s unrestrained behavior. I mean, they actually TARGET medics and ambulance staff. They stole an ambulance and used it to commit a massacre in the Gaza Strip and NOBODY says a thing!!! It is just another news item!! They KILL foreign journalists and observersé where are their governments!? Europe’s OFFICIAL SPECIAL ENVOY Miguel Moratinos was twenty meters away from the room Israeli tanks shelled, and the EU don’t say a thing!!! As if nothing happened and we are back to business as usual!! Why on earth do they allow that?! How can it be that Israel gets away with all this?? How on earth does the world expect us not to feel that the world is colluding with Sharon?!!? Can’t they see that, from our point of view, they are looking like accomplices to Sharon’s crimesé they are actually encouraging him! Don’t they see that they are CREATING the next Bin Ladens; millions of them!! Don’t they care for their own children?

Had it not been for the fact that we know first-handedly what terror is really like, we would have wished Sharon’s insatiable appetite for destruction reaches the Arab countries and the whole world. But then again, didn’t we passively watch while over a million (yes OVER a million!) Iraqis got drained out of the last ounce of life in them? Didn’t we stand idle like spectators of the most grotesque form of “Real TV” as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children had their very short lives extinguished? If capital punishment with lethal injection is so “inhumane” and deserves urgent mobilization in order to abolish it, shouldn’t the priority be the more sinister slow death of innocent children? Should we recall that these guiltless newborns don’t die in sixty seconds of painless lethal injection, but rather in sixty days of endless pain! They are born into pain! What on earth could be more wicked!? I just can’t think of something more horrid; not even the death factories of the Holocaust. For all those who use the Holocaust to justify the crimes of the “Middle East’s only democracy” I ask them: “will the killing of six million Iraqis quench your need to rectify Saddam’s Scuds?” I hope so, at least we would know that there IS an end to all this.

However, by then, I don’t know if we would still be willing to be part of such a “world community”. I think by then, you would have beautified death to us so much that we would rather be part of the “other world”. For, in such a “world order” which you are creating (both passively and actively), death attains a positive value. Unlike, the degenerate form of life this world has to offer, death becomes a tool of change. The cynical truth is that when a person dies he/she stirs change. To those people, change in itself (any change) is necessarily good because it is a move away from the status quo; this unbearable status quo. If this world out there still does not understand why a beautiful young Palestinian medic chooses to take the lives of several Israelis with her rather than pursue a successful career, then this world must be too blind to be worth living in.

You see, the lesson she learnt from world politics is that only when Israeli lives are at stake is the situation “critical” enough for the world to mobilize and “diffuse the situation”. It is true. For years and years Arab lives have been pricelessly wasted while the world watched; Deir Yassin, Qibya, Kufr Qassem, Bahr El Baqr, just to name a few. Nobody felt the urge to try and redress them. Thousands were killed in Sabra and Shatila, yet the perpetrators are all alive and well and leading successful lives. Hundreds of Arab civilians have been abducted by Israel for years without a sentence and when Hizbollah detains three Israeli soldiers the whole world goes in commotion. How can the world see those three Israeli soldiers and not see those Arab workers, teachers, and villagers. Israel officially detains them as bargaining chips for the return of its soldiers; it actually endorsed this policy of abduction in public! Had those tools of terror (Israeli soldiers, in case you didn’t get who I was referring to!) not been abducted there would not have been any attempts at releasing the Arab detainees as is the case today. YOU SET THOSE RULES. International resolutions against Israel have been stacked for years gathering dust in the UN and only when the rate of Israeli deaths in South Lebanon started reaching an average of twenty deaths per year did the international community gather its resources to implement Security Council Resolution 425 calling on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon.

That young Palestinian medic was just applying what she learned from the “new world order”. Unless the world chooses to change this horrific formula the victims will just keep playing by those rules; the rules YOU set by CHOOSING to stand there and watch us die in silence. Palestinians don’t like dying and they seek a life of dignity and prosperity. For years they have been asking the world to be fair, to intervene, and to enforce the various resolutions on Palestine but to no avail. We went from British Mandate, to refugees, to freedom fighters, to suicide bombers. Wouldn’t it have been easier if the world just did us justice right from the beginning and spared us (all of us!) all this pain? Without justice there can be no peace. It is such a simple concept, why can’t the world accept it. Is it really that hard to understand!?

I pray to God you realize by now that you (yes YOU!) who is passively clicking at the mouse to view the next message or pressing on the remote control to passively “watch” what is happening around youé I hope you now realize that you just pushed the button detonating the next suicide bomber. Please, for YOUR sake, for your selfish love of your own life, try doing something more creative! Let’s change the rules of the world. Give justice a chance.

Sincerely,

A Palestinian that is sick and tired of death!

P.S.: for those Arabs reading this, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Hundreds of Europeans, INCLUDING Jews, are rallying to ACTIVELY help us. Don’t hide yourselves behind the defeatist answer “what can we do?” do something; anything, just don’t just stand there! Be creative there are a million ways you can help other than voicing your anger and claiming you want to fight for Palestine; how easy it is to promise someone the moon! We have plenty of fighters in Palestine and we don’t need any for the time being. We need you to make a difference; each from where you are and to the best of your capacities. Think! Or are we supposed to do that for you too?

Nizar Farsakh is a research assistant at the Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem (ARIJ).