I’m sitting on a rock at the edge of the village, in the middle of nowhere.
It’s less of a village and more like a few houses and a few sheep pens. The “houses” are really just concrete walls topped with sheet metal; the “pens” are stone enclosures covered with tarps.
I’m sitting on a rock at the far end of Tahla, in the south Hebron hills.
Diary of M.
How does the saying go? If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. Or something like that. If that’s true, God—or whoever is in charge—must have been laughing her head off over the past year of my life. Since I don’t believe in God, the only one who (didn’t) laugh was me.
I thought I had to wait for a definitive answer before writing anything, but nearly six months of limbo have passed and that answer is slow in coming. I wanted to wait for the perfect moment to wrap things up, when—so I hoped—my emotions and thoughts about this whole process would also take on a coherent structure. But after six months of waiting, I’m resigning myself to the fact that I don’t know if that moment will ever come the way I had imagined it.
Palestine gave me a new name, one that no one had ever pronounced before.
Palestine welcomed me like no one ever had before.
It welcomed me with sweet tea, in front of a fan or around a stove.
It welcomed me with the acrid smell of taboon and its strange tobacco, with dust always on my shoes and flakes of sheep's wool carried by the wind.
Palestine welcomed me at night on mattresses on the floor with heavy blankets, welcomed me with breakfasts of warm bread, oil, and bandura or with endless trays of rice.
Autumn nights are very long in Masafer Yatta: dogs bark all night long and every noise becomes frightening when you have to keep watch to make sure that settlers don't leave the outposts. On Saturday evenings, they often celebrate Shabbat in this way, armed and hooded, hunting Palestinians, ready to destroy houses, wreak havoc in fields, slaughter sheep, and sometimes even beat entire families with sticks.
On September 30, representatives of the Associazione Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII (APG23) took part in the general debate during the 60th session of the UN Human Rights Council on the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied territories,” which highlighted grave and systematic human rights violations.
Read more: https://www.semprenews.it/news/Gaza-dichiarazione-Nazioni-Unite.html
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