Palestine

25 February may sound like a typical day, but this day is different in Al Khalil. It is a day that brings many awful memories from 27 years ago.

In the last days of February, while the weather shifted unpredictably, I witnessed a tragedy. On the way back to the office from the checkpoints, we saw a settler family, two children with their parents, in Hebron’s old city.

Yes, we are human right observers, and we are locals. In September 2020, CPT Palestine was back to work after months of lockdown and restrictions due to COVID19. But, this time the team was different, for the first time the Palestine team was a team completely made up of locals.

The 1967 Nakba and what followed was a further disaster for the Palestinian people when Israel took control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than 300,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and a large number displaced outside of the country. The Palestinians who remained not only lived under great oppression but also witnessed the building of Israeli settlements across their land.

For seventy-two years the Israeli occupation has tried to bury Palestinians, literally and figuratively, attempting to extinguish their dreams in every possible way.

When a physical structure is destroyed, the intention is to erase all traces of existence, end life, vanish the truth, stop the fight, and fill with fear to drown out hope.  But in the resistance, you realize the real substance is not in the foundations or the concrete. What held that home together in its essence was the struggles that continue, even if all that’s physically left are the keys in the museums. Like museums, stories are not there to create parallel universes, nor to tell distant and foreign realities; they are made to weave lives together, to connect collective memory in a fight against oblivion. To me, these museums preserve the lived memory, the evidence of strength used to fight, and the permanent effort to inherit the legacies.