A source on politics, war, the Middle East, Arabic poetry, and art.
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).