Shahd Abusalama’s grandmother was close in age to Prince Philip who died last week, prompting the author to ponder how both Philip and her sitti were from a generation that lived through the end of Britain’s imperial empire, but from strikingly different vantage points.
Gordon Gregory, a Tory candidate for Parliament in the upcoming UK election, tells Shahd Abusalama, “If the violence from Palestine stopped then the Israel would have no reason to attack. But whilst attacks are continuing and the existence of Israel is not accepted, they have no reason to stop occupying.”
Shahd Abusalama writes, “Palestinians’ legitimate claims continue to be silenced at the expense of sustaining Israel’s longstanding myths of being the safe haven for world Jewry and a democracy with the world’s most moral army. As if we are not as worthy as the children of Holocaust survivors of freedom, security, justice and dignity.”
Shahd Abusalama writes, “Being a Palestinian means that you wake up daily to more dehumanisation and oppression. Whenever I have a panic attack and a friend asks what started it, I realise they have no clue about how we experience violence. It’s ongoing. It’s constant.”
The murder of Ali Dawabsha is deeply connected to Israel’s “War of Independence,” which declared Israel as a Jewish state after a systematic process of ethnic cleansing that included massacres, like Deir Yassin, and soon after the Kafr Kassim massacre of 1956, whose perpetrators were pardoned and freed after a year.