Ceasefire Palestine Quotes

As I write this, a ceasefire has still not been called. I wonder what reality you now live in. From the point in time at which you read this, what do you say of the moment I am in? How large is the gulf between us?

Sonnet of Palestine I don't want to wage a war, All I want is to raise a family. I don’t want your empty pity, All I seek is a little humanity. To call genocide as self-defense, May be textbook diplomacy. Killing innocents to keep control, Is an act of terrorist hypocrisy. Brokers may bring ceasefire, But they can never give us liberty. All they do is arrange assemblies, While we suffer through the century. So I say to you o people in luxury, Look at us and you'll know your fallacy.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation: They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.

By Friday June 9, the fifth day of the war, Israeli forces had decisively defeated the Egyptian and Jordanian armies and occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Arab East Jerusalem. Early that morning Israel had begun storming the Golan Heights, routing the Syrian army, and was advancing rapidly along the main road toward Damascus. The council had ordered comprehensive cease-fires on June 6 and 7, but Israeli forces entering Syria ignored these resolutions, even as their government loudly proclaimed its adherence to them.

I rushed down to meet my father, expecting him to explain why the council had agreed to allow another two hours of delay. Goldberg wanted to consult with his government, my father told me flatly. I was incredulous. How much consultation was needed to impose a cease-fire resolution? With a strange, bitter smile, my father responded dispassionately in Arabic. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “The Americans are giving the Israelis a little more time.

In addition to aerial bombardment, according to a report issued by the Israeli logistical command in mid-August 2014, well before the final cease-fire took hold on August 26, 49,000 artillery and tank shells were fired into the Gaza Strip,31 most by the US-made M109A5 155mm howitzer. Its 98-pound shells have a kill zone of about 54 yards’ radius and inflict casualties within a diameter of 218 yards. Israel possesses 600 of these artillery pieces, and 175 of the longer-range American M107 175mm gun, which fires even heavier shells, weighing over 145 pounds. One instance of Israel’s use of these lethal battlefield weapons suffices to show the vast disproportionality of the war on Gaza.

The next day, September 16, I was sitting with Kerr and several of my AUB colleagues on the veranda of his residence when a breathless university guard came to tell him that Israeli officers at the head of a column of armored vehicles were demanding to enter the campus to search for terrorists. Kerr rushed off to the university entrance, where, he later told us, he rejected the officers’ demands. “There are no terrorists on the AUB campus,” he said. “If you’re looking for terrorists, look in your own army for those who’ve destroyed Beirut.” Thanks to Malcolm Kerr’s courage, we were temporarily safe in a faculty apartment at the AUB, but we soon heard that others were at that moment in mortal peril. On the same night, September 16, Raja and I were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops’ arrival in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no shooting. The city was quiet and fearful.

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.

By Friday June 9, the fifth day of the war, Israeli forces had decisively defeated the Egyptian and Jordanian armies and occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Arab East Jerusalem. Early that morning Israel had begun storming the Golan Heights, routing the Syrian army, and was advancing rapidly along the main road toward Damascus. The council had ordered comprehensive cease-fires on June 6 and 7, but Israeli forces entering Syria ignored these resolutions, even as their government loudly proclaimed its adherence to them. By that night in the Middle East (still afternoon in New York) Israel’s forces were approaching the key provincial capital of Quneitra, beyond which stood only the flat Hauran plain between their armored columns and the Syrian capital, just forty miles away.

for Falasteen the boy i adored at sixteen gifted me his keffiyeh feeling guilty for living when others were killed simply for existing i haven’t seen him in sixteen years but think of him often these days his grandmother’s purse still carrying keys to their home believing they’d return in weeks can it even be called a key if what it unlocked is no longer there? we’d sneak onto mall rooftops & pretend shooting only happened with stars! 'we have a duty of memory,' he said, 'so they’ll kill us all until only the soil is witness' how could i reply? i sat in my liquid silence today there are nurseries of martyrs they bomb babies for they fear enemies hiding between pacifiers & tiny wrists bomb hospitals because enemies hide in ICU bedpans bomb schools because enemies hide in children’s bags bomb the oldest mosques & churches because enemies hide in rosary beads & votive candles they bomb journalists because enemies are hiding under their PRESS vests & helmets bomb poets because enemies hide in pages of peace poems the elderly are bombed because enemies hide under their canes the disabled are bombed because they harbour enemies in their artificial limbs they raze & burn all the ancient trees because enemies make bombs from olives they bomb water treatment plants because enemies are now water & so it goes: justification provided exoneration granted business as usual & the boy I adored has green-grey eyes the colour of fig leaves we don’t speak but i wish to tell him 'i’m sorry the world is a blade i’m sorry home is blood & bones i’m sorry music is sirens & wails i’m sorry night is infinite' but the boy I adored has grey-green eyes the colour of forgotten ash

While Israel buried its dead, and before its ground operation in Gaza even began, eighteen progressive members of the U.S. Congress signed a resolution calling for “an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” One was quoted as saying “when we say Black Lives Matter, what’s really being said inside of that statement is a history of oppression.” More than a thousand black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants later pushed the Biden Administration for a ceasefire as well. “We see them as a part of us,” one reverend told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.

When Israel invaded in 1982, there’d been a lot of recent violence across the border, all from Israel north. There had been an American-brokered cease-fire which the PLO had held to scrupulously, initiating no cross-border actions. But Israel carried out thousands of provocative actions, including bombing of civilian targets all to try to get the PLO to do something, thus giving Israel an excuse to invade. (44)

When Rahman returned to his home during the first temporary cease-fire on August 2, however, he found rubble of his neighbors’ home littered with human flesh and dismembered limbs. Some had not been able to escape after all. According to Rahman and several of his neighbors, Israeli troops from the Givati Brigade ordered the Wahadan family who lived next door to him to remain in their home when they invaded on July 17, warning them that if they attempted to evacuate they would be shot. Seven military-aged males among the family were blindfolded and abducted to Israeli prisons, where they were subjected to days of interrogations about Hamas, tunnels, and guerrilla operations they had no involvement in. The rest of the family — women, children, and an older man — were then kept on the ground floor of the house for six days. During that time, while the Israeli army engaged in periodic clashes with fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other armed factions operating around Beit Hanoun, it held the Wahadan family in the ground floor of the house, refusing to allow them to leave as the soldiers maintained the home as a base of operations. When it appeared that a brief ceasefire would take hold on July 25, the soldiers retreated from the home, but ordered the family to stay inside. The following day, with the Wahadans still inside their home under direct army orders, the Israeli military called in strikes on the area, killing every trapped member of the family. In the course of an hour on July 26, much of Beit Hanoun was destroyed under a storm of Israeli artillery shells.

Among the first journalists to make it into the town was Tamer al-Meshal of Al Jazeera Arabic. Al-Meshal arrived in Khuza’a as hundreds of traumatized refugees fled int he other direction, many carrying decomposing bodies wrapped in blankets. The road was littered with the corpses of those cut down by Israeli tank fire as they tried to escape. Among the bodies was that of a teenage girl killed a few meters in front of her wheelchair. In a home at the eastern edge of town, al-Meshal found a pile of burned bodies in a bathroom spattered with dried blood and pieces of flesh. On August 2, when a seventy-two-hour ceasefire finally took hold, Ghadir Rujeila was found by refugees who had been straming out of the village. She lay dead six meters in front of her wheelchair, crumpled along the side of the road, filled with shrapnel and partly decomposed. The teenage girl had apparently attempted to chase after her fleeing family before Israeli tank fire cut her down Left behind in the chaos, she bled to death alone.

On July 20, Hesham’s twenty-three-year-old cousin Salem Shamaly returned to his neighborhood at 3:30 p.m. during the temporary ceasefire to search for missing family members alongside members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). At the time, Salem’s parents had no idea he was in the neighborhood. As Salem waded into a pile of rubble wearing jeans and a green t-shirt with the ISM volunteers just meters away, who were clad in neon-green vests identifying them as rescue personnel, a single shot rang out from a nearby sniper, causing his body to crumple to the ground. As Salem attempted to get up, another shot struck him in the chest. A third shot left his body completely limp. Apparently, he had crossed the red free-fire line.

Throughout Palestine, victory was understood not necessarily as a decisive military triumph, but as a forceful demonstration of qualities like sumud (steadfastness), fidaa (sacrifice/ redemption), and ebaa (stubbornness in the face of power) during a prolonged trial. This attitude has, of course, been a feature of anti-colonial struggles throughout history, from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa, but it was especially pronounced in Gaza, where 1.8 million ghettoized refugees were taking heavy losses against a nuclearized army equipped and financed by the superpowers of the West. I witnessed the clearest distillation of this defiance in Beit Hanoun, the decimated northern border city. There, during the mid-August ceasefire, I met a family gathered above the ruins of their home, a four-story structure that had been transformed into a massive crater by a direct hit from an Israeli fragmentation bomb. On a flat slab of concrete that sat above the gargantuan sinkhole, grafiti read "3 to 0," portraying the Palestinian armed factions as the victors of the last three military conflicts in Gaza.

I asked Raed if the international community could do anything to help him. “Our message is simple,” he responded. “We don’t need any aid or anything. Just put pressure on the Israelis so they get out of the sea and let us fish and bring a livelihood to our families again.” By October 2014, attacks on Gazan fishermen within the six-mile fishing limit had become routine. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights documented eighteen shooting incidents in the two months after the ceasefire and at least four instances in which fishermen were arrested while working inside the six-mile line. …fishing off the coast in northern Gaza, peppering the crews with rubber-coated steel bullets and arresting seven of them. Not a single rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza in these two months. Amidst the one-way ceasefire, the New York Times described the atmosphere as “a fragile calm.