Thus when Palestinians are starved, beheaded or blown to smithereens in Yarmouk, we stand puzzled. We offer sympathy, tears and little action. We cannot even articulate a coherent discourse, aside from pulling out UN Resolution 194 from some dusty archive to talk about the Right of Return, and how the suffering in Yarmouk is ultimately Israel's responsibility. Proud of our efforts, we carry on with life as if we saved the refugees, all at once, with a single link to a UN website.
When Israel carried out its war on Gaza last summer, nearly 150,000 people protested in London in another massive show of solidarity, duplicated in many cities across the world. For Yarmouk, about 40 people showed up, an admirable effort, but expressive of the fact that the refugees no longer exist at the heart of the Palestine discourse.
In the constant attempt at exposing Israeli injustices against Palestinians, most of us were duped into an Israeli-PA attempt at reducing Palestine to a tiny margin of its actual physical and political spaces that extends from Palestine -- the entirety of Palestine -- all across the Middle East, hovering above Yarmouk, as it has for many years, without us noticing.
We are trapped in Area A, making an occasional crossover to Areas B and C, only to get back to Area A, where it is relatively safe and easy to fathom and explain. We are stuck behind Israeli walls and checkpoints as we are failing to see the massive space that is Palestine, and the millions of refugees still holding on to tattered deeds and rusty keys, since we promised that that their Right of Return is paramount.
Did we lie? Were we lied to? It is more like we were duped into pseudo-reality crafted so proficiently by Israel, and we are finding it extremely difficult to break away from its confines.
But if our hate for the Israeli occupation, and our loathing of Israeli policies are greater than our love for the Palestinians, all of them, starting with the refugees dying in Yarmouk, then, perhaps it is time to reconsider our understanding of, and relationship to, the conflict altogether.
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