January 6, 2009 – 8:37 pm
About ten years ago, just before Ehud Barak was elected Prime Minister of Israel, he was asked by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy what he would do had he been born Palestinian. Barak replied frankly: “I would join a terror organization.”
I admired that honest answer as it showed that he may have understood the mentality of many of his Palestinian occupied subjects. He was elected on the basis of going ahead with the peace process and I always thought that if he really understood the Palestinian mentality he would do his utmost to prevent young people like from joining terrorist organizations.
Alas, he didn’t achieve peace back then, nor do his actions now show that he really understood the Palestinian mind. Being myself a Palestinian and knowing how many of my people think, I dare put myself in the shoes of an Israeli citizen and try to reach any new conclusions. Read More »
December 1, 2008 – 12:24 pm
Picture courtesy of Lilia Araj.
Why do I love my country? – The question keeps torturing me.
Most pressing of all, apart from what they taught us in first grade and what certain billboards tried to achieve in recent years, do we really have to nurture such an emotion at all? While to some people the uncertainty itself is blasphemous, I am not ashamed to say that my thirst for a rational answer keeps intensifying with time. I just cannot suppress the itching curiosity to understand the roots of this non-severable connection that I’ve developed with earth, concrete, very little water, and a whole load of hairy, grumpy strangers.
I am not interested here in the theories of a social contract, taxation, or the tribal or political attachments to a certain community or nation state. I am intrigued by a totally different aspect of this relationship, the one, for example, that triggered a profound sadness in me as I read that the toll of the recent fire in the Dibbeen forest was a staggering 5,670 trees lost forever, taking the news as if a piece of my own flesh had been charred by the same fire. Why did I feel like that? Read More »
