Oh, the time has just flowed
like the blood of a massacred baby.
Now that's all over
but the American dollar
is already talking
of a Third World War"
Strangely, the life outside is not particularly different from the one in prison. The difference is that it's a time that flows unlike the frozen time in prison. "The time has just flowed/ like the blood of a massacred baby." Such a terrible image for such terrible times!
That's the situation of the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Children
conceived during the Six-Day War in June of 1967 are today forty-seven years
old. Forty-seven long years of occupation by the vindictive state of Israel,
the Palestinians continue to be what Edward Said terms, the "victims of
victims" of the Holocaust -- the genocide that the Nazis conducted against the
Jews.
Time has frozen for Palestinians as it did for those in the "concentration
camps of Dachau" with the "gas ovens" and Hiroshima following suit. It's like
they're living a nightmare in which events happen against your will. There is
only one thing you can be in a nightmare; i.e., a witness to the unending fear
and pain that you intend to wake up from. The Palestinians are witnesses to the
death, humiliation and pain under Israeli occupation on a daily basis.
Israel is a fruit of European guilt for having persecuted the Jews in combination with the racist and exclusivist ideology of Zionism, which traces the so-called homeland of the Jews to Palestine based on Biblical evidence as preposterous as Lord Ram being born in the Babri Mosque site. Why were the Jews not given a separate state in one of the Western countries if Europeans cared so much for the Jews? The answer is obvious. Why should they entertain a minority that they persecuted for centuries! They made their "problem" somebody else's problem and today when Europeans and Americans befriend the state of Israel against its so-called Arab enemies, it's nothing but a case of opportunism wedded to hypocrisy.
In Iraq and in Afghanistan and across the third world where the "poor" are the victims of globalization -- time flows "like the blood of a massacred baby." How different can things be for the Palestinians locked up without a future except for blurred recollections that prisoners or the visually challenged experience of a distant world -- a world that seemed to have existed once upon a time.
Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984 has such "dreams" -- a time before "Big Brother" became the order of the day. Imagine a nation of Winston Smiths and that would be the Occupied Territories for you. Imagine a globalized world of Winston Smiths trapped in situations from which there is no escape and that would be the poor and downtrodden of the earth.
Israel is the Big Brother and every Palestinian in the Occupied Territories experiences the making of a memory that can only mean death, cruelty and infinite suffering. The "American dollar" continues to colonize the world. Western media will do its share of state-based corporate reporting on behalf of rich elites in the US and the pro-Israeli lobby that has everything to gain in the occupation of Palestinian Territories.
The irony is that children continue to be born in the refugee camps of West Bank and Gaza not knowing that they've come into a prison, not knowing that their parents are the colonized of the earth, not knowing that their fragile existence is made even more fragile with the possibility that they could be maimed or dead before they fully attain consciousness thanks to a relentless enemy called Israel backed by an evil American empire and not knowing that they're lambs to be massacred at the altar of a peace whose price they're born to pay. Time is flowing in Gaza like "the blood of a massacred baby" with Israel raining ammunition on the defenseless.
The oppressor fears time but the oppressed embrace it because it brings with it the hope of a new world. Both Israel and its master the United States are buying the "time" they do not possess in fact. Time does not belong to colonizer. To him it's an objective fact that exists independent of the person. To the colonized and the oppressed, time is a subjective fact of daily life. It is inscribed on his or her body and mind as wound and scar. That is the time of the Palestinians in the Occupation-resisting Territories. It's a time that'll redeem itself through resistance. It's a time without an end.
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