on reaching the first quarter of a century before Bilal told me - without looking in his eyes - how the Israeli soldiers were trying to humiliate him to induce him to confess during his detention.
Sometimes the place the food on the toilet bowl, ordered him to eat, and sometimes the wrists and ankles tied together behind his back and left him in that position whole day, often deprived of food and sleep, and each interrogation carried out with a bag of jute impregnated with dirt on his head.
Bilal has admitted belonging to terrorist groups who knew only by name, and this has remained in solitary confinement for three years in prison for ten.
Happy Birthday, Tommy.
I returned a few days ago, I was not there yet, but I can not quite Palestine in somatization. I had limited expectations due to a short time and the very nature of group travel, but the emotions were so many and so strong that they transcend any compromise with my instinct backpacker.
At the moment, I find myself holding only one certainty: if there is in the Holy Land - and there's no doubt - a form of religious fundamentalism violent, well, is not of Arab-Islamic matrix.
Impunity, power, arrogance and fear are the basic ingredients of a cocktail which makes perpetual ruthless and perhaps irreconcilable, the mother of all conflicts.
But a conflict rarely sees an imbalance of power so evident as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The thousand frames I'm thinkin paint a mosaic as complex as primary, without falling into that rhetoric can not deny the obvious: Israel's occupation of the West Bank, as well as his verbal abuse, physical and cultural daily against the population Palestinian, are a disproportionate response and certainly not constructive in relation to real dangers which runs the State of Israel.
In short order, I recall the first time in front of the checkpoint, radiographed and analyzed by boys barely eighteen with an M-16 shoulder and a look of challenge, the eight-meter wall against the sky (for comparison, the Berlin Wall was the top half) that dissected the West Bank offensive to human dignity and international law, the hostility of the settlers of Hebron that strong contingent to protect them (four soldiers per settler) throw garbage every day and stones on the suq (ie the market) of the Arab streets below (covered by mesh to protect merchants, however, victims of bullying and harassment daily), the tension is felt in every corner of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Sharim to Jerusalem, where time seems to have frozen a ghetto-est of the Thirties and the dialogue with Israelis, Zionists, tourists, Arabs, or who else is frowned upon and discouraged.
outside the Palestine conflict is inevitably in the background: the messy pile up of houses with bricks of a uniform anonymous beige backdrop of barren hills will not help the mind to free himself from, and the beauty of Jerusalem (see a night prayer at the Wailing Wall is only emotionally, the Dome of the Rock that stands sull'intricato suq of walled Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre is so that instead of hordes hostage Russian and American tourists hungry to lose any aura of sacredness) and the old city of Hebron, as well as the harmony of the Chapel of the Nativity in Bethlehem, can not deal with the state of perpetual siege around them.
Even the tomb of Abraham, the sacred place for everyone as it celebrates the father of the three monotheistic religions, is powerless subject of checkpoints and entry control of a division into two parts (half synagogue mosque half) of the building following the massacre that the jew settler Baruch Goldstein committed against the Palestinian community of Hebron in 1994 when shot to death 30 Muslims at prayer machine gun that gave him away.
that I had little knowledge about the history of Israel, when for the first time under the palms of Guayaquil I met a guy born and raised in Tel Aviv who like many others, finished the three years of obligatory military service, had taken a year sabbatical to cross South America.
Under the scorching sun that illuminated the Ecuadorian coast, Orad Palestinian explained to me that the occupation was the only way to secure his country had the freedom to imagine their future. Perhaps unconsciously, he was into focus on the point of view of its political leaders on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
certainly unconsciously, I said that a nation is at war since it exists, and who lives in a constant state of anxiety due to the syndrome of isolation that can justify any atrocity in my opinion could not be called free. I remember that I finished the conversation saying that a wall and an army can certainly limit the freedom of the body, but a jailer who fears his prisoner will have no free thought.
been a few years, I finally visited the dark side of his country, I have thorough knowledge of reality and many people representing the various actors involved, and I'm still in touch with Orad, who later became a good friend Travel throughout the adventure to the Galapagos.
But as the reasons for including propaganda israeliana e tenti di evitare una visione manichea della realtà palestinese, devo riconoscere che le mie posizioni non sono cambiate in merito: purtroppo, contraddicendo Orwell, oggi la via più rapida per porre fine ad una guerra non è neanche più quella di perderla.
Un abbraccio palestinese
Tommy
