And the death of the people was as it has always been:as if no one, nothing had died, as if they were stones falling on the ground. or water on the water
Y la muerte del pueblo fue como siempre ha sido: como si no murlcra nadie, nada, como si fueran pledras las que caen sabre la tlerra, o agua sabre el agua.
Pablo Neruda Canto General, 1950
Found on Hakaya, Muzna's blog.
The only difference, it seems, is that it is all happening a few hundred kilometers further down. The bombs, the rhetoric, the images, the dead, the wounded, the lies, the media – it is all the same. Lebanon 2006 has become Gaza 2009, and the world still argues over whether to ask for a ceasefire or let Israel play its deadly game a few more rounds. Even the flyers are the same. I remember we once found them on our rooftop: ‘Hassan [Nasrallah] is playing with fire! You tell him to stop and we will stop bombing you.’ They are having similar ones in Gaza now, complete with phonenumbers to call if you want to tell the Israelis ‘where the terrorists are’. A good example of what to do with these requests can be found here.
But those are the harmless type of flyers, pieces of paper you can laugh at, then crumple up and throw away. The ones that say ‘tonight your neighborhood will be bombed’ are a little harder to ignore. And the people in Lebanon at least had somewhere to go – although sometimes bombed on their way out of villages – but the people of Gaza, where can they go?
Moreover, why these flyers? If I tell you in advance I will kill you, is it then no longer a crime when I do?
Paper is not the only way of communicating, of course. It’s quite easy to pick up the phone and call a random number. In Lebanon, we get phone calls from Israel with pre-recorded messages in Arabic telling us to dump that Hezbollah-guy already. In Gaza, so I’ve heard, the calls are personal, telling people specifically that their house is the next one to be bombed. It is unclear whether these calls are made by the government or by zealous settlers who want to help their army hurt as many Palestinians as possible, physically or psychologically.
Of course, for every action there is a reaction, and the movements on the Palestinian side of the war are now circulating emails with the access code for Tel Aviv and how to say in Hebrew ‘there is a suicide bomber outside your house!’ The more interesting campaign, however, encourages everyone to call the people in Gaza and let them know that there are many who support and think about them in this hellish time. It can be done as follows:
You want to call a family in Gaza and give it support? 1. Dial, from a mobile, fixed, or public phone Palestine code number: 00970 2. then dial Gaza code: 8 3. dial 7 digits , given that the first 3 digits are one of the following: 213 -205 – 206 – 282- 283 – 284 – 286 4. then dial 4 other random digits
example: 00970 8 213 5678
There is often no electricity, so it might be hard to find someone who can actually pick up the phone, but I would urge you to try nonetheless. As a Palestinian currently living in Belgium says:
"I'm from Gaza but currently i live in Belgium for studying, or actually i have just finished my master, but all my family lives in Gaza. I talked today with my mother, and i was surprised when she told me that the telephone doesn’t stop ringing from people from other countries like Iraq, Saudi, Lebanon... and many many people. They dont know them and they talked for hours with them, the thing is you can’t imagine how much this raised my family morale as well as all the Gazan's familes over there, even me where i almost lost my faith with all the international community especially from the arabs. It raised me too much up."
And if you can’t get through, or if you only speak Dutch, please go to www.verhefjestem.nl and send a message to the members of the Dutch parliament. They will reply that they are on vacation until January 12th, but maybe an enormous stack of emails will prompt them to do something upon return. For many Gazans that will be too late, but for others it might be just in time.
It’s the kind of information brought up in the bar, after a few drinks. ‘Hey guys, guess what, I read somewhere that the Lebanese are the least happy people in the Middle East.’ Hilarity all over. Really? Why would the Lebanese people be the unhappiest? Sure, there is a lot of fighting, war, explosions, bad electricity and thieving phone-companies, but still, most Lebanese are convinced they are the envy of the whole region, with everyone being jealous of the beautiful beaches and green mountains and sparkling nightlife and wonderful food… Well, apparently they aren’t. According to this report, the Saudis are the happiest. Speculation ensued over the reason why. The first question was, how could the people from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain be at the top of the list? Surely they must have forgotten to ask the Saudi women about their level of happiness, or maybe they stuck to the law and asked the women’s legal guardians: ‘Excuse me sir, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy is your wife?’
But how could even the Palestinians rank higher on the happiness-scale? Maybe, it was argued, they were lumped together with the Israelis, and since it’s an Arab survey, they cannot use the name Israel. But would the Israelis be really happy with the way things are going there, even if they currently have the upper hand? ‘Well,’ was the final word on that ‘even if they aren’t, they can’t say so: they are the Chosen People, living in the Promised Land! How can they ever be unhappy?’
From the above arguments, it was deducted that the Lebanese might not be the most unhappy, but are rather the most honest people of the whole Middle East. Either that, or, as someone said, their low ranking should be attributed to their incredibly high expectations and disproportional sense of entitlement. I'm still undecided.
So now we can call to Palestine. Until yesterday, if you wanted to talk to someone in the Occupied Territories, you’d have to call from Lebanon to Jordan, and Jordan would connect you to Gaza, Ramallah or the West Bank. It was the first decision of the new minister of telecommunications of the brand new Lebanese government, to open the lines with some of our Southern neighbors. We still can’t make phone-calls to Israel, though. But Israel can call us. They did, during the war of July 2006, to tell us that we were playing with fire by allowing Hassan Nasrallah to ‘play around in our country’, and that we would burn for it. Not that we didn’t notice already. Apparently they are still doing the telephonic anti-propaganda, because a few days ago Walid’s grandfather picked up the receiver and heard a voice explaining to him in perfect Arabic that really, it’s time to get rid of Hezbollah. The old man, not knowing it was a recording on the other end of the line, gave them a piece of his mind: he would decide who to support and who not.
So what if we could call Israel? Would anyone there listen to political advice from this side of the border?
