Last week Laila El-Haddad's story of trying to get into Gaza to visit her family made its way across the Internet. El-Haddad was detained at the Egyptian border and eventually forced to return to the US without entering Gaza. Part of what made this story notable is that El-Haddad was giving real time updates over Twitter.
El-Haddad has now written up her entire story on her blog Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother. Please go read the incredible post.
Phil has been writing a lot about Kafka lately, but El-Haddad's story takes the cake. Here's one passage:
Officer #1 divided up the room into regions: the 5 or so south Asians
who were there for whatever reason-expired paperwork, illegal
documentation- were referred to as "Pakistan" when their attention was
needed; The snoozing, sleep-talking woman in the back was "Indonesia";
and the impeccably dressed Guinean businessman, fully decked in a sharp
black suit and blue lined tie, was "Kenya" (despite his persistence
please to the contrary). There was a group of Egyptian peasants with
forged, fake, or wrongly filed Id cards and passports: a 54 year old
man whose ID said he was born in 1990; another who left his ID in his
village 5 hours away, and so on.By this point, I had not slept
in 27 hours, 40 if one were to count the plane ride. My patience and my
energy were wearing thing. My children were filthy and tired and
confused; Noor was crying. I tried to set her cot up, but a cell within
a cell did not seem to her liking and she resisted, much as I did.We took the opportunity to chat when officer #1 was away. ""So what did you do?" asked Kenya, the Guinean.
"I
was born Palestinian" I replied. "Everyone in here is being deported
back home for one reason or another right? I bet I am the only one
being deported away from home; the only one denied entry to my home."Officer
#1 returned, this time he asked me to come with him "with or without
your kids". I brought them along, not knowing what was next.
Read the entire story here.
In the JPost article where The US Senate included a measure to restore full funding for foreign aid to the budget it approved late Thursday, increasing chances that the pool of money including assistance for Israel wouldn't be cut.
Theres a second part on immigration reform for the US
———————-
The petition urges the government to take legislative action rather than conduct wide-scale raids on illegal immigrants,
The coalition was welcomed by two Jewish members of Congress, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), who said they would urge immigration reform that would act humanely toward the 12 million undocumented workers in America.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1238562906554&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
——————–
Hey guys, how about similar pressure for Israel to drop its draconian immigration policy?
What a disgusting woman! Why would any mother knowingly put her children through that? Then again, these are the people who raise their babies to be suicide bombers. I guess I'll never understand them. Don't care to understand them, really.
SOG,
You can use your real name, we can smell you. Stop hiding behind the great Jim Haygood's moniker. Go back to wanking your 50 mm machine gun.
PM
However is making that disgusting comment (as Jim H.), I sincerely hope a Qassam hits you in the testicles: people like you can't be fit as fathers.
I've linked to that story too. I hope people realise that the time it takes to read it pales into insignificance compared to the time this lady and her two children spent in limbo…
Reminds me of the journey of the St. Louis, albeit, one hopes, with less dire ultimate consequences.
On a similar Kafka-esque note, I found this description of life in Azzun Atma, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, on a blog called "Israel's Backyard".(Its written by an Israeli woman in Machsom Watch.) link to draykcab.wordpress.com
/>
And here's a description from her friend Daphne, of the bizarre and oppressive conditions in Azzun Atma:
link to draykcab.wordpress.com
Dr. Shlomo Sand, a professor in Israel, has some interesting things to say. Jonathan Cook summarizes his latest research:
1. "… until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion."
2. the current Palestinians were in fact the ancient Jews who later converted to Islam
3. the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends
4. there was no exile
Dr. Sand's solution to the IP conflict:
" that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21020.htm
Thanks for alerting us to this.
At the western end of the WB village of Mas'ha, not far from Azzum Atma, there is a single house (and family) wedged between the Wall and the fenced-off settlement of Elkana. The Palestinians need a key from the occupying Israeli soldiers to get in and out of the special locked gate to their house — a one-family ghetto!
The Wall, as usual, runs as close as possible to the built-up Palestinian areas, cutting off the maximum amount of land for the settlers and never mind the hardship for its owners and inhabitants.
Thanks pearl. The same self styled experts insisted the majority of 'palestinians' are recent immigrants from syria, egypt, yemen, iraq, brought in by the higher wages paid by Jews.
Go figure.
Laila's whole story is must reading. So you know what your tax dollars are supporting and why
your nation's soldiers are in the Middle East. Email it to everyone you know.
An Egyptian in Cairo, working for the Egyptian ministry of Internal Security, deports a US-non-permanent-resident Palestinian woman to the US instead of allowing her to enter Gaza, for Egyptian reasons relating to Egyptian policy towards the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip.
End aid to Egypt and Hamas now!
Yes, end aid to Egypt, which is only the glue to keep Egypt from sparring with Israel, so in effect also aid to Israel (at the expense of USA taxpayers and the average Egyptian under the Egyptian
tyranny).
Pearl..had read San's piece in le monde Diplomatique. Great stuff.