ronically, it was
in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no god. For how could
a god, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such
horrors like those in Palestine to happen?
This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike
that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by
gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But
it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his
brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body
going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…
that’s what finally did it.
Nearly 20 years have passed since that day and I have now
married into a Gazan family. I am a wife and mother, the sister and aunt of so
many kids living the horror of what Gaza has become. As we watch the footage of
Israel’s onslaught, I hear myself whispering as I see one more martyred child,
"Run to the angels… run." After so many years this living nightmare is fostering
a burning desire to believe once again in the afterlife.
Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like
sheep but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to
comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t
important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these
stricken and shattered little bodies who frankly never experienced life to lose
it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.
A crowd gathers, shrouded in gas, smoke and dust. In the front
stand eight young fathers, each holding a white swaddled bundle of what used to
be a son, a daughter. For a few moments there is no screaming, no chanting or
crying but a moment of quiet and stillness that presses one to wonder just who
has been granted the greater mercy, the toddler who caught the sniper’s bullet
or the young father who will have to find some way to live beyond this moment.
A young boy sits on the sidewalk beside his mother. She is
propped up against the wall of a collapsed building and her life is bleeding out
all over the sidewalk. It is spattered on his face and smeared on his shirt. She
uses the last of her strength to lift her arm and clutch his cheek in her palm
and then she is gone. He rests his head in his hands and cries. He is all alone.
The camera zooms in on the scene of a freshly detonated
building, a civilian home. A little girl’s brown curly hair covered in dust and
eyes wide open is all that can be found of her. Her mother wails and pulls her
hair while her father frantically searches among the rubble for the rest of his
daughter, where could she be? I whisper again, "You will be made whole again in
paradise. Run to the angels."
What amazing faith. What strong devotion that a father loses his
mother, father, wife and eight children, that this man before anything can
assert, "God is great; Thank god for everything." He holds his child, now still
and ashen, he smothers him with kisses and then gently pulls back the sheet to
expose two bullet holes in his chest. He then tenderly places the child beside
his brother and again pulls the sheet back off his youngest son to reveal a
single sniper’s bullet to the chest. He can barely compose himself and he moans
to the sympathising cameraman, "God is great; Thank god for everything."
An old and wrinkled imam so lovingly cradles a little girl’s
lifeless body, as if mishandling her now could inflict more pain, he mumbles a
benediction and gently lays her beside her sisters and her brothers in the mass
grave. I try to comfort her, saying, "Finally, a place of safety. Rest beside
your sister. Your brother. Put your fears to rest and meet your beloved prophet
and the many of your little friends who have fallen before you."
Hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, UN shelters, all
worthy targets. Doctors, medicines, food and water, truckloads of relief from
all corners of the world line up for miles at the Egyptian border but they are
refused entry. Security is high, food is scarce, water is completely gone.
Faith seems to spring forth in the strangest moments. For me it
seems to be coming full circle out of desperation and in agony, for the sake of
the snow-white souls of the many bloodied and dismembered innocents of Gaza.
UN workers coordinate with Israelis to get civilians to safety
inside a UN school. Hundreds are tucked inside the mutually agreed safe haven.
Soon after, the school comes under Israeli fire. Bruised and battered refugees
stare Satan in the face, clad in his fatigues. Hundreds wounded, scores dead,
many lost and unaccounted for.
Governments negotiate a ceasefire. Rumours buzz of conspiracies.
The US president-elect is forever silent. Parents search beneath the collapsed
walls for what remains of their children. Shattered concrete, random arms and
legs, broken glass, tossed together in a bloody hodgepodge. But in my mind I see
them whole, their little bodies swiftly being swept up into paradise and I call
out to them, "Run!" n