Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I went to a pretty good concert last night. It's kind of difficult to retain the appreciation of that in my mind, when... everything.

This piece I read yesterday sticks with me:

Of course the protesters know that no one will be returning anywhere at the end of this march. Of course they have no plans (or means) to remove the fence. And of course this protest isn’t an attempt to somehow remove or negate the state of Israel. Any suggestion that these are the aims or expectations is ridiculous. The protesters merely want their voices to be heard; they merely want the Nakba, and its decades of repercussions, to be included in the rest of the world’s narrative, rather than dismissed. It is only the hope of becoming a fully recognised state one day (with all its accompanying freedoms) that has kept Palestinians alive these last 70 years – alive through wars, blockades, endless indignities and uncertainties. Those 70 years have turned the Gaza Strip into a prison where everyone is serving a life sentence; and everyone’s children will serve a life sentence too; and their children’s children, and so on.

The protest’s message is simple: We cannot live like this for ever; even after 100 years Palestinians will still be born with inalienable human rights, however much the Israelis want to stamp them into the dirt. Israel cannot expect to enjoy peace, stability or prosperity while we are still penned in like animals on a factory farm. The fence is not only a physical border between two nations. It is also a conceptual, discriminatory line between two worlds, two realities. The misery of one world is the happiness of the other; the dreams of the former are buried beneath seven decades of sand in the latter.

Atef Abu Saif, for The Guardian