FreePalestine

[FreePalestine] My thoughts on the campaign

Cenida Jones

Hello Everyone,

I'm new to the website but I'm a long time Obama supporter. I just wanted to introduce myself to all and say I am so proud of this country for having a candidate that really connects with the American people and seems to understand that we need to change how we're doing things. One of my fav quotes from "Obama is that you can't keep doing the same thing and expect a different result."

This is true in so many ways, I am in line mostly with many of the campaign beliefs but I really hope that Mr.Obama would rethink his position on Israel and Palestine. I am in touch with a couple of Jewish volunteers who are working inside Palestine and they send me updates to share about what's going on over there. So I just wanted to share this with you because I know a lot of people don't know what's going on over there and also because many people don't get to hear the Palestinians side of the story. I'm and approaching this subject in leui of the speech Barack gave in front of AIPAC so this is relevant to the campaign. If you have any questions or concerns please email me or message me from my profile. Remember you can't keep doing the same old thing and expecting a different result:

Dear friends,

I've been thinking about the urgency of 1948. One of Ben Gurion's
most repeated quotes among Palestinian refugee communities is, "The
old will die and the young will forget." The young have not
forgotten. Everywhere I have traveled in the Arab world - Palestine,
Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria - Palestinian children tell me the names of
their original villages that they still hope to see someday. Even the
youngest of children will say things like, "If I don't return to my
village, then my children or their children will."

Perhaps this is the nature of displacement, that the desire to return
is compounded as long as the right to return is denied. But how to
explain the urgency? Those who were young at the time of the Nakba,
60 years ago, are dying. Just as the Holocaust generation of Jews is
slowly passing away, so is the Nakba generation of Palestinians. The
difference is in the collective world memory of each tragedy. The
Nazi Holocaust is denied by very few today (and even fewer with any
kind of world power), whereas the Nakba continues to be denied by the
powerful, as it has been for 60 years. Each time I visit with Nakba
survivors who currently live inside '48 (Israel) and have Israeli
citizenship, I am astounded that the desperation in their voices far
exceeds most of what I hear from Palestinians in the West Bank (Gaza,
currently, is another story). Why is this? In all superficial ways,
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have a better standard of life
than those in the West Bank. West Bank Palestinians, however,while
continuously besieged and attacked, rarely find themselves face to
face in conversation with people who deny their identities, their
histories, and their experiences. Palestinians with Israeli
citizenship face this every day.

We visited last week with a man who lives just a few miles from his
original village. He showed us a map the survivors have made, in
Hebrew, with each person's name and house and land marked. "We were
here," he kept saying, "and we farmed, and we went to school, and we
had a bus station, and we owned land. We were here. This is my
father's name. We were here." He kept offering tidbits of proof, as
though he expected us to doubt his story.

When he took us to the land, as he has so many times before, I
couldn't help but think about the number of Israelis, foreigners, and
perhaps even Palestinians who drive by there each day without
realizing there was
ever anything there before the Jewish National
Fund planted a pine forest. The remains of houses can easily be
mistaken for stone paths. Not one house remains, but that doesn't
stop our guide from taking us to a spot on the land that to me looks
like any other, and saying, "Welcome to my home. Someday you will
come back here and visit me in my rebuilt house and I will serve you
tea."

The urgency is in the living memory, the denied reality, the willful
invisibility. The Nakba is not something that happened 60 years ago.
It is a process that continues to this day, and it is a process that
can and must end if we are ever to see a true solution for the people
of this land.