Sunday, March 21, 2010

From Megan Stack's forthcoming book

Look at this passage by Megan Stack from her forthcoming book: why can't mainstream journalists write like that? ""The bombings were huge and awful [yes, Megan, but Israeli bombings were more huge and more awful], but the sufferings of the Palestinians was chronic, dripping through the days like acide. All the small horrors that get washed away from a distance, that never make the news but are the grains of earth in that place--the Palestinian cancer patients who are not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment; the Palestinians mothers who gave birth at checkpoints; the people who hadn't seen their families for years; the shepherds who led their flocks accidentally into the wrong spot and got blow away; the Palestinian-American woman who came to visit her family one summer and got stuck because the Israeli wouldn't give her a permit to drive back to the airport, because even Palestinians with American passports are treated like plain old Palestinians once the yset foot inside Israel; the settlers who ransacked the olive groves; the market stalls and greenhouses torn down. The occupation was a cloud of punishment that raged in times of suicide bombings and in times of quiet, a few miles away, invisible." (p. 49 from the pre-publication copy of the book).