Fourikis I’m Gonna Tell God Everything

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5069-0507-5
Verlag: First Edition Design Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

Under the bleak Israeli occupation, not many would have imagined that love between the oppressed Palestinian women and the carefree Israeli settlers could take root, but it did! Amal was tall, well proportioned, walked like a princess and talked with her eyes. One evening, she was spellbound watching the sunset when Aaron, a dashing Israeli settler approached her. In Hollywood stories, love blossoms between a man and a woman ever so slowly, but in real life, love strikes like a mongoose. Their love affair did not last long because the Israelis stoned Amal to death.Almaz, Amal’s sister decided to escape Israel’s cast iron clutches, and with the financial help of her friends, studied at the Sorbonne, in Paris, because she believed that only the educated are free, an aphorism the divine Hypatia of Alexandria postulated. After graduating from the Sorbonne, she travelled to Adelaide, in Australia, to gain a perspective on the Middle Eastern muddle from a distance. With Jason, her lover, they storm the Citadel of the Enlightened where Jostein Gaarder, Gideon Levy, Alon Ben-Meir, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said and Margot Wallstr?m reside, to debunk several myths that proclaim the Israelis are God’s chosen people who maintain the most ethical armed forces in the world and believe that killing Palestinians is not really a violation of human rights.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fourikis, Nicholas

Leseproben

Chapter Eight
Soon after that divine night, Almaz moved in with me, and our plans to travel overseas receded into the background. While Almaz and I were in seventh heaven, travelling overseas could wait was our unspoken agreement. Adelaide children don’t care when the swimming season starts; they play near the water, and if the temperature feels right, they venture into the Gulf St. Vincent. Almaz and I never intended to join the swimmers but joined the crowds that flocked the Glenelg beach to celebrate the first warm day after a windy August ended the long winter. The air was still and people around us were running, laughing or playing ball games. Near the water, the young girls built castles and the boys battle ships. From a distance, it looked like we were all gathered to worship Helius, the Sun god. Sitting on comfortable foldable chairs under a large beach umbrella, we were in for a splendid foray into the summer. I felt comfortable knowing that we could quench our thirst by reaching for the icy cold drinks we had in the Esky. If I remember correctly, my favourite drink at the time was grapefruit juice. Almaz was looking at the front page of Le Parisien, covered with photos that hooked the readers and directed them to the full stories covered on the pages within the newspaper. “Thanks to you,” I said before she turned to the meaty pages of the newspaper, “I have a fair idea of what is going on in Palestine; can you share your vision of the future?” “It’s not easy,” she said as she let her newspaper fall on the white sand, “because every rogue nation covers its wretchedness by using clever public relations.” Israel, she continued, claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East because the Israeli Army hounded my people out of their lands in’47 and ’48 and are languishing in 59 refugee camps located in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria ever since. Persistent propaganda portrays the Soviet Union as the Worker’s Paradise when over one million dissenting intellectuals are held in 840 gulags. You probably know one of these dissenters was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Large, multinational companies also use ingenious public relations to maximise profits. You’d remember the tobacco companies glorified smoking for a long time. Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, James Dean and many more famous actors had a cigarette between the lips. Thank god for the whistle-blowers who risked their lives to tell the world the truth. Not many know that Ralf Nader was the first man who used the epithet ‘whistle-blowers’ instead of ‘informers’ or ‘snitches,’ that have negative connotations. Jeffrey Wigand, a high-ranking member of the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, was harassed and received anonymous death threats after he revealed his firm introduces chemicals such asammonia into cigarettes to increasenicotine delivery and addictiveness. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are two contemporary whistle-blowers who are fighting for their lives because they released several volumes of secret information held by western countries. “For my money, however, Solzhenitsyn was a whistle-blower par excellence, for he described the hunger and diseases the political dissidents suffered in the inhumane conditions that prevailed in the gulags, most of them conveniently located out of sight, in Siberia.” Almaz asked and I offered her a bottle of Evian from the Esky. I then poured myself a glass of grapefruit juice to quench my thirst. Satisfied I asked Almaz if we could return to the Middle East issues.  “Of course, we can,” Almaz said, “and I’ll start from the beginning. I particularly admired Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, because he played a leading role in the signing of the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian National Authority and granted it partial control over parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Prior to  signing of the Accords, Rabin received a letter from the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) Chairman Yasser Arafat renouncing violence and officially recognising Israel; on the same day, the 9th of  September 1993, Rabin sent Arafat a letter officially recognising the PLO. After the historical handshake with Yasser Arafat, at the South Lawn of the White House on 13 September 1993, Rabin said on behalf of the Israeli people, ‘We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears—enough!’ Rabin’s words resonated with the nations of the world, who witnessed several wars between us and the Israelis. And in 1994, Rabin, Arafat and Peres received the Nobel Prize for Peace. In accepting the Nobel Prize, Rabin declared, ‘Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.’ These were the days when my parents, the rest of the Palestinians and the world rejoiced. Who wouldn’t rejoice the end of many wars between the Israelis and my people? The Accords, however, greatly divided Israeli society, with some seeing Rabin as a hero for advancing the cause of peace and others seeing him as a traitor for giving away Israeli land. Sadly, Yigal Amir, a radical right-wing Orthodox Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords, assassinated Rabin on the 4 November 1995. From that fateful moment, the dream of a two-state solution in Palestine steadily receded, and instead of peace, we have witnessed several Israeli assaults on Gaza. In no time, the Israelis converted the Gaza Strip into the largest open air gaol on earth by sealing its borders with Israel; furthermore, Israeli boats in the Mediterranean and a bilateral agreement between Israel and Egypt completed Gaza’s isolation from the rest of the world. With these arrangements in place, the Israeli Army and Air Force could assault us whenever the Israeli Command wished. As you can imagine, our Gazan folks were sitting ducks for the Israeli firepower. My uncle will never forget the 2008 attack, when he lost half of his family on the first day of the attack. The Israeli Army and Air Force, he told us several times, launch their attacks at 11am. “Why 11?” It’s the time the Palestinian children vacate their early morning classes so that other children can occupy the classes for the afternoon session. The timing of the Israelis therefore insured that the maximum number of young Palestinian students were exposed to Israeli fire from the ground and from the air. “That is atrocious!” Fourteen hundred people were killed during the attacks that lasted 21 days, and thousands were wounded. As you can imagine, many thousands were left homeless, my dear Jason. “I’m speechless!” “You are speechless, but the image below illustrates how Professor Noam Chomsky, an American Jew, described the Israeli attack on Gaza.       “They are assassins,” I said, “but what was the reason for the assault?” “Talking about the reasons for the frequent incursions into Gaza, Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime minister, was candid. ‘Israel must actively defend all its borders by itself,’ he told the international press, ‘including the security envelope in the Jordan Valley and the West Bank. And, Israel will act to mow the grass as frequently as necessary to degrade enemy military capabilities and keep Israel’s rivals off-balance.’?” “His language is sickening,” I burst out. “How could anyone equate the killing of humans with mowing the grass?” His intent of ‘mowing the grass’ as frequently as necessary gives me the shivers too, but let me introduce you to more disgusting language that reflects the Israeli psyche, my dear Jason. Every time Israel embarks on a new round of wholesale slaughter in Gaza, polls show that more than 90% of Israelis support the butchery; I say this because the Israelis use the latest killing machines on us and we have no armed forces , ammunitions and escape routes. When the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) starts dropping cluster bombs, white phosphorous, DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive)munitions and other horrendous weapons on Gaza, crowds of Israelis pack the hilltops (separating the Strip and Israel) to barbecue meat, drink alcohol and cheer as they watch Palestinians of all ages being blown to bits. According to the Israeli blogger Elizabeth Tsurkov, the mobs’ favourite chant is: ‘Tomorrow there is no school in Gaza, they don’t have any children left.’? While the Israelis enjoy slaughtering Palestinians of all ages, they take special relish in killing pregnant women. A T-shirt popular in the Israeli army shows a pregnant woman with a bullseye target on her belly and the legend reads: ‘One shot, two kills.’ Killing children is the de facto official policy of the Israeli military. Almaz continued as if she was in a trance . . . Yesterday the Israelis shot eight young men; six were under the age...