How can anyone dream? Or believe that there is hope in the world? Really, how??
Why must they break us every time we try to dream? Every time we feel hope, they crush it. We try to express ourselves and they silence us, we try to refuse and they destroy us, we try to move on and they provoke us, we try to get angry and they imprison us. If we take up arms, they call us terrorists and kill us, and if we try to resist through art, they bomb us. Why do we have no right to dream like any other human being created in God’s image? Why are our dreams nightmares full of ghosts and trauma and horrible memories, full of blood, murder and bombs?
Enough. I’m tired of feeling this grief over young men, women, and children, over youth and babies who die every day in the camp. Even the living are not really alive. I want to carry this camp away, whisk it off in the middle of the night, and flee with it to a far away place that no one knows of, a safe place that has more love than this. Because enough.
Enough! We have a right to live!
My father’s generation and my grandfather’s have lost their hope.
They stopped dreaming a long time ago, and now this generation is losing it as well. What a shame. I mean if you ask a child from the camp what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll tell you, “a martyr.” Oh God, what a heart-wrenching dream. Do you know why that is the answer? Because quite simply, there are not many options in the camp, and the easiest option in Palestine is to be a martyr because your dream is % 100 guaranteed. The heartache is too much.
I met my dream by chance through a theater called “Freedom” in the Jenin camp. I was a child who had a dream, but the dream was still foggy, not yet clear. Yet with time, I began to discover that I love the camera, I love to write stories, and I also love acting. There in the theatre, I began to build a special place for myself. I began to express myself and my feelings. My voice began to be heard. I started to fear that I would lose my dream. I began to defend it in every way. Through theatre, film, and books I defend women, children, Palestine, the camp. That is where I found my way to resist, where I succeeded in realizing a small part of my dream. This theatre was the home of my dreams. It’s like when you find that light at the end of the tunnel. The theater helped me overcome significant traumas that the occupation has caused my generation.
In 2002, when they invaded the Jenin camp, they destroyed us emotionally and psychologically. They destroyed the future of an entire generation. One of these traumas was when the army killed Riham al-Ward in front of her classmates at school. This is one of our memories. I remember the next day we draped Riham’s school uniform that was covered in blood on her seat and placed roses on it, and continued the lesson with an ugly memory etched in the brain of every girl among us.
21 years later, a few days ago, they invaded the Jenin camp once again.
They blew up houses, killed people, and drove people out of their homes.
It’s heart-stopping. They blew up part of the Freedom Theater. They don’t care about houses or theaters or schools or hospitals, they don’t want them. They want us dead or to submit to their occupation. But we are a very stubborn people, we love life.
My love, the Jenin camp, the Freedom Theater, Juliano 
Thank you, Elan, for translating 
Editor’s Note: The article first appeared on Maryam Abu Khaled’s Facebook page, and was translated by Elan Cohen.
Maryam Abu Khaled
Maryam Abu Khaled, born in Nazareth in 1991, started in the theater when she was 15. She completed a training program at the Freedom Theater in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin. She has performed around Palestine, Europe, and the US. One of her projects is the documentary Art/Violence, inspired by the actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was killed in 2011. Since the 2016 season , Maryam Abu Khaled has been a member of the ensemble at the Gorki theater in Berlin, Germany.
I guess the Palestinians haven’t heard that the West Bank belongs to the Jews:
https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/10843
In response to a letter from Adalah, denouncing Israel’s illegal settlement ‘regularization’, Israel’s Cabinet Secretary, representing the government, categorically denied the Palestinian right to self-determination. The Secretary claimed that Israel’s control over the West Bank is in line with international law, is legal, and is not considered an occupation.
The letter claimed that Israel is not an occupying power in the West Bank and has the legal right to impose its sovereignty, on the basis of a 1920 treaty. It further stated that while Israel is not obligated to comply with the laws of occupation, it has chosen to do so as a “matter of policy”, despite the fact that mountains of evidence demonstrate the opposite.
Here’s the letter sent by the Cabinet Secretary to Adalah in English:
https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Response_Cabinet_Secretary_19_June_2023.pdf
SOMEWHAT RELATED – What’s Mine and Not Yours: Enclosure Inflicted by the US and Israel | By Reb Halabi | CounterPunch | July 7, 2023
EXCERPT: . . . From the early days of the English Protestants landing on the shores of America, it was believed that a place needed to be carved out in order to live their interpretation of the Puritan lifestyle and austere worship of their white Christian God. These ‘uncivilised lands’ were to be conquered and ultimately cordoned off from those whom the English had taken it from. Enclosure was a law they had learnt back in England, and it was going to be the new law in the new land – at the point of a gun if necessary. And so they commenced their ‘imaginative geography’, to reference Edward Said’s work in Orientalism.
The early Puritan leader, John Winthrop, was part of the Massachusetts Bay Company which provided a charter and consent for an “extraordinary experiment in godly self-government” (Winship). He believed they were “consciously modelling themselves on the ancient Israelites”. Winthrop suggested that the New England Puritans were “like the Jews – as like as like can be” (Clark). One may well be curious as to why this sounds familiar.
The remodelling of Palestine was first given the green light by England, yet again causing immense grief to indigenous people. It wasn’t enough that the British government had metaphorically trodden over the heads of Native Americans in 1600’s but were at it again three hundred years later by signing the Balfour Declaration of 1917; thereby condemning the Palestinians to another instance of British led settler-colonisation. . .
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/07/whats-mine-and-not-yours-enclosure-inflicted-by-the-us-and-israel/
P.S. I have a Puritan 8th great-grandfather who came over with John Winthrop the Younger a few years after the older John Winthrop came over. Also, my 8th great-grandfather’s mother was Mary Ann Winthrop, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly how she was related to the John Winthrops.
I also appear to have a 9th great-grandmother who was a Mohawk Indian (if Ancestry.com is to be believed)!
There is an element of sadism and viciousness in their actions, and it is obvious they WANT the Palestinian people to keep suffering (preferably in silence), as they loot and kill. They keep treating them all inhumanely, and they are known to call them beasts and animals.
While they are signaling they are going after the West Bank now, and openly defying the UN as they break international laws to achieve all that their greedy hearts desire, let us keep in mind not only has the US been funding this brutal occupation, but that Kushner, Trump, and now Biden, are making sure that the West Bank will be in the hands of the apartheid nation, and that they will attack, kill, and maim, the Palestinian people, using every false justification,
to get rid of the those who stand in their way.
My call today July 7, 2023
into C-Span’s Washington Journal during “Open Forum”
My comment about Israel’s latest illegal incursion into the Jenin Refugee Camp.
Give it a try folks. Millions of people listen to Washington Journal/Cspan
6:15 for my comment and question about Cspan not ever covering the four International Reports determining Israel is an Apartheid government
https://www.c-span.org/video/?529099-4/open-forum-part-2