Personal Testimonies
,, Bare Chests
(Dr. Eyad
El-Sarraj is Human rights activist & Chairman of the board of Gaza
Community
Mental Health Program.)
My guest
for dinner was Larry Towell, a Canadian photographer. With his
professionalism
and
experience, he is famous in the world of photojournalism. I came to
know him during
the first
Intifada through another friend who recommended him to me. At the
time, it was his
first visit
to Palestine, which attracted him by the pictures of children
fighting an army and
challenging machine
guns.
Palestinian
enthusiasm affected him. With his camera in hand, he roamed the
streets and
fields
between settlements and army garrisons. He took pictures of angry
faces, sad tears,
mournful good byes, and
a lot of stones.
When we
departed last time, anger had caught on to him. He was sad.
Afterwards, he
published a
photo book telling the story of heroism and arrogance, the song of
freedom
and guns of
tyranny in a great epic. One of the pictures in the book won a
"picture of the
year" award.
Before
coming to Palestine the second time, he asked me, "What is going on
over there?
The whole
world thought that you are very close to peace and freedom." I tried
to explain to
him our
anger, humiliation, feeling of rebellion, and longing for a day of
freedom, even if it
came one day before
dying.
Larry came
with his camera that seems to weave magic in his hands. After
touring the area
for a few
days, he said, "Nothing changed. It is still the same faces behind
the barricades
shooting
bullets at freemen. It is still the same arms chasing dreams with
rocks." With
sudden
anger in his voice, he continued, "Don't you Palestinians learn from
your past
experiences
how to avoid defeat? Did you not learn from your enemies how to
achieve
victory?"
"How?" I asked.
He put his
camera aside and drank some water before saying, "Why don't you
invite youth
from all
over the world to your farms, villages, and refugee camps? Why don't
you establish
Palestinian
Kibbutzes? Don't you know that Israel invites youth from all over
the world to
visit their
Kibbutzes? They make them offers to attract them to come, and use
their
presence in
two ways. First, they participate in the work at the Kibbutz.
Second, they fill
their heads
with Israeli propaganda. Since its establishment, Israel has done
this and has
made
hundreds of thousand of people ambassadors for Israel in their
respective countries.
Some of these people
have become ministers, parliamentarians, professors, or
journalists."
Larry
noticed that I was impressed by the idea. He looked at me and I
said, "this is a great
idea."
With
increasing anger, he shouted, "Did you wait for the likes of me to
tell you that you have
a rich
heritage of heroism, and that you should think of how to win and not
just fight, before
more of your young die?"
I replied,
"how to win and not just fight. But our enemy is well armed and
America supports
it. We don't have what
they have."
Firmly, he
said, "You have the belief in your just cause. You just have to
change your
methods and
learn from your experience and that of others. Let me ask you, how
did the
USSR
crumble? Before that, did anyone expect the defeat of apartheid in
South Africa?
Did anyone
think that Vietnam could defeat a superpower like the US? What is
the
difference
between you and those that won? They changed their methods and did
not rely
on the gun
alone. They relied on their strong belief and on alliances with the
forces of
peace. They
achieved breakthroughs with the world media when people we
sympathetic
with them.
Did you know that after the incident of Mohammad Al-Durra, the world
became
a strange
place for everyone? But you negated that with the lynching of the
Israelis, the
burning of
Joseph's tomb, a tomb for one of your prophets, and when you started
to shoot
and kill like them."
Wondering,
I asked him, "Did you want us to stand them with bare chests without
any
resistance, and not to
meet bullets with bullets?"
He replied
calmly, "No my friend. I want you to resist and to win with your
bare chests. Do
you know
how the world would react if you held a peaceful rally without
stones and bullets
led by
great people like Carter, Mandella, Mary Robinson, and other
advocates of justice,
some of
whom are Jewish? How would the world react if Israeli soldiers tried
to stop this
rally in
front of TV cameras and tried to fire teargas? Why don't you have a
world peace
movement
under the title of 'justice now' in comparison to the 'peace now'
camp in Israel?
Why don't you unite with
them?"
I thought
long on what the man said. He wasn't a magician; and his ideas are
not new.
Maybe we
are afraid to try something new. Maybe we were born and raised
believing that
killing, bullets, and
revenge are the lone path.
Maybe we have to think
of how to win and not just fight.
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