A Palestinian story, partial and incomplete.
Palestine as subject, infinitely political. It is one… of mummified leaders, of weathervane experts, of ossified legalisms, of selective justice, of non-existent repercussions, of vacuous verbosity, of fake promises… A tale of recurring predation and tactical “causes”… of magical settlements and solutions…
And endlessly flowing words… rushing rivers of words gushing, converging, clashing… Words as apparitions beckoning.. Words as ammunition, wounding… Words, melodious in speeches, like notes floating in the wind of promised change… while behind the pontification one wonders at the persistent drone of Apache helicopters, the percussive violation, the voluminous velocity of machine gunfire, the discordant explosions of white phosphorus penetrating flesh, breaching Red Crescent ambulances, consuming from the inside, defying water, and doctors, and medicine…
Filasteen as a big bang of decaying lives, dispossessed… dispersed and dispersing still… scattered outside their homes, ripped from ancestors… Bodies buried under rubble, putrefying, banishing the Green fragrance of olive trees, orange blossoms and jasmine.. Filasteen, a breeze off the Middle White Sea shore, (almost) fatally transformed into a furnace from an imported Hell, a deliberate agony… Filasteen, changed, renamed… becoming a borderless Black badland built… on a crime, concretizing a colonial chimera… an entity, now playing fake victim, of manufactured histories and pre-determined archeology… of God, deaf… of prophets, dead… of doom, descending… of deliverance, demanded and still denied… of fate, of passivity….
Witness.
A Palestinian story, a testimony. Imagining, invoking, implementing, Intifadas. In images of the oppressed, not the Other. Simmering centers of resistance. Hints of the cracks in the armor of empire? The denouement of the self-described eternal victims’ victorious trajectory? The ripping of masks and the exposing of faces?… Will their expressions register the inconvenient intrusions of atrocities committed? Will colonizers’ consciousness contemplate created chaos cancelling community, compassion, cooperation, co-equality, co-existence? Will language languish, lessening, deadening, depriving, destroying, delivering demands of disaster? Or will words shake up and shake off? have their own intifada? seek substance? expose ethnic cleansing, banned weapons, disproportionate attacks disguised as “retaliation,” pompous delusions of the proclaimed possessors of “intelligence” and “rationality”?
Filasteen was, is, and will BE… when language ceases to be… a shield against reality… when words are real – acknowledging and confirming… that “collateral damage” is intentional, is normal praxis… that military “actions” really are “precise” and “accurate,” but purely for maximizing terror and provoking upheaval... that claims of “civilization” are conceit…
And also Filasteen as protagonist, possessing persistence, sumoud, initiative… A people, hoping, believing… in Justice, in Truth… rejecting oppression, channeling discontent, and clinging to their humanity… refusing to disappear… insisting on remembering, on recounting, on enduring, on rebirth, on being….
A Palestinian story is… Roots… Rights... Recognition… Resistance... Revolution... Resurrection… Return...
Each and every One, awaiting Union.
Not knowing when and how, but certain of every inch of where…
Dina Jadallah-Taschler is an Arab-American of Palestinian and Egyptian descent, a political science graduate, an artist and a writer. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
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