This is one of the darkest moments in our history
This is one of the darkest moments in our history.
I cannot believe that after all the suffering and torture they have endured, they may be hanged in the end, and that it would be considered legal, while the world continues to remain silent. Two hundred lsraeli prisoners kept the world's attention. As for the approximately 9,500 Palestinian detainees, they are treated as if they are nothing to care about. But for us, this is sheer inhumanity. This is absolute injustice.
This goes beyond dehumanization. It is far worse than hell, for these free souls and their families.
May the world stop turning, or end entirely, before a single detainee is hanged.
Excerpts from the letters of Walid Abu Daqqa, imprisoned since 1986, who passed away a few months ago after being left to > fight cancer without treatment in the prisons of the occupation.
"I write to you from a parallel time. We do not use your units of time, minutes or hours, except in the moment when our time meets yours, near the visitation window. Then, we are forced to conform to your time, because we interact with your measurements of it."
"Who can stop time? It is my blood that is bleeding. not the minutes.. and it is the souls of my comrades that are soaring, not the hands of the clock..
Do you know what I miss most from the outside? That someone would ask me a simple, ordinary question.
For example: Do you have some change? It doesn't matter whether I do or not, the important thing is that someone asked me. It's been along time since anyone asked me anything
Here I am, at this late hour of the night, conversing with paper. Tomorrow is the first day of Eid. A day for which I have not kept new clothes for 24 years.
I have no money to break into small change.. No sweets to give away.
I am not a fighter or a politician. I am simply Someone who could have continued his life as a painter or a gas station worker, as I was until the moment of my arrest. I could have married early, to one of my relatives as many do, had seven or ten children, bought a truck, understood the trade of cars and the prices of foreign currencies... All of this was possible, until I witnessed the horrors of the Lebanon War and the massacres that followed, Sabra and Shatila. They created within me a profound shock and astonishment.
To stop feeling that shock and astonishment, to stop feeling the sorrows of people, any people, to become numb in the face of
atrocities. for me, that was a daily fear, a measure of my resilience and steadfastness. To feel for people, to feel the pain of humanity, is the essence of civilization. The essence of the rational human is will;, the essence of the physicai human is work; and the essence of the spiritual human is feeling. And to feel for people and for the pain of humanity is the essence of human civilization
This very essence is what is targeted in the life of a prisoner, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. You are not targeted primarily as a political being, nor as a religious being, nor as a consumer deprived of material pleasures. You may adopt any political belief you wish, you may practice your religious rituals, and you may even have access to many material needs, but what is targeted first and foremost is the social being, the human within you.
What is targeted is every relationship beyond the self, every connection you can form with people and with nature, even your relationship with your jailer as a human being. They do everything to make us hate them. The target is love.
What is targeted is every relationship beyond the self, every connection you can form with people and with nature, even your relationship with your jailer as a human being. They do everything to make us hate them. The target is love”.
