Reflections on the occupation
Humbly dedicated to the residents of the Occupied Syrian Golan.
isolated fabricated in contrast with the other degredation and simultaneous progression that has characterized all societies thrust into modernity but this story is different this one is built on the graves of the family members of over 100,000 people who fled in just a few days time as planes roared overhead and flew low over their houses, planes
bearing the Israeli flag, terror in their hearts, sparing themselves, abandoning their houses without knowing whether they’d ever see their homes, their gardens, their fields, their neighbors again
Not knowing that even their footsteps would be erased, that their houses would fall to bulldozers, only a few short day slater. that erected upon their land the landscape would be changed to reflect a new imagining of their landscape, an illegal and immediate colonization that would transform their landscape into the familiar identical red-topped roofed shapes on the horizon
the fields filled with landmines and barbed wire
the mountaintops full of the eyes of military observers who blew up the land and sent bullets through its air and put up their feet in their shiny new kitchens that were planted on the still smoldering remains of the villages below them.
they would say, our nature is taken away.
there is no nature, only IDF.
they would say, we are Syrian. they would say, enough. and they would begin to blend into the landscape and to pile on top of one another, and to erase the memory of trees and gardens and space
and hope and would begin to live under a new name: occupation.
how much hope can a people have who have endured and endured?
how much stock can a people put in an international system that speaks but no one listens?
how much resistance can they endure when even their staunchest resisters are fluent in the language of the occupier, when the school’s curriculum tells another person’s story?
when families are cut off and dissidents imprisoned and the very sustenance of the people themselves comes from the construction of other peoples’ homes on their own land
on the ruins of their neighbors’ homes, on their memories some would call it torture;
here they call it progress.
There are some who will agree that this grotesque twist of the history and functioning of a people, that this forcible manipulation, that this cruel distortion of history and person is an improvement
because it’s measured in mercedes and mobile phones.
piled up next to the remnants of lost civilization, what are we looking at?
What I see when I look at this place is much more than a comfortable life.
It’s more than the hospitality of a people who welcome me into their homes and orchards and shops and hearts.
I see an accidentally chosen people, living in the shadow of ancestors they are prohibited from knowing.
This is not an argument between tradition and modernity.
This is not a battle over which trumps which. this is a battle over who has the right to choose his own destiny, to write her own history.
I am reminded of the tragedy of losing a friend, of losing a playground.
“this used to be my playground.
this used to be my childhood dream.
this used to be the place i ran to whenever i was in need of a friend.
why did it have to end?”
Mosque destroyed in war
Great piece of writing-but what is IDF? I like how you ended with lyrics from a Madonna song. Reminds me of “A League of Their Own”. Remember THAT movie? Of course you do, you were born of the same woman. I would love to visit the Golan with you, but I’m scurred of the border control!