I remember the death of Ziad Hassan. He was making coffee for his family. The whole town was under closure. The year was 2002. The Israelis came in, as they did every dawn, creeping with their humvees and their jeeps - this time they didn't bring in the tank. But later that same day they did, tearing up the streets of Qalqilia, taking down all the palm trees that were in the median strip of the main road in town, crunching the pavement into pieces of rubble. Ziad was shot before we were awake. But I was on the ambulance crew - just an observer, just a helpless fucking 'human rights observer', doing the same thing Rachel Corrie was doing when she was crushed to death by a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer made in Peoria, Illinois for standing in front of a doctor's home in Rafah with a megaphone trying to tell them to stop. She was braver than me, maybe. I didn't stand in front of the D9. But I saw it. I saw it in Qalqilia. I took pictures as it came barreling down the street. Bigger than any bulldozer I had ever seen in my life. A tank of a bulldozer. The blade of the bulldozer was as tall as a house. It was a giant. The kind of monster kids have nightmares about when they sleep.
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When I arrived with the ambulance crew, another ambulance had already brought Ziad in to the hospital. But I saw him die there. Bleeding from his head. He was making coffee for his family. Some trigger happy soldier on the street below saw the glimmer of the dawn hit the metal of the coffeepot, mistook it for a gun (I am speculating here) and shot through the third story window where Ziad lived. The bullet went through the coffee pot, and into Ziad's head. And all I could do was stand there helpless, taking pictures. They just wanted the world to know. "Please", the people pleaded with us. "Just show the world what is happening to us here." They thought the world would listen, would put a stop to it. But here we are twenty years later and the world has not put a stop to it. And the Israeli government, under a fascist leader who was known in the 1990s for his extremism, is bombing Gaza into smithereens. For two straight months. Non stop (except for a few days 'pause'). Netanyahu is a genocidal maniac bent on revenge, and will not stop until Gaza is flattened and every person there is expelled. He is truly hell-bent on making this a new Nakba for the Palestinians.
After photographing Ziad in the hospital - alive, then dead, we went to his house. They wanted us to document his blood on the kitchen floor, the coffee pot with the hole in it. They hoped against all hope that someone would investigate this time, that someone would be held accountable and stop this madness. Then Ziad's mama was told the news. They kept her out of the kitchen. I can still hear her wailing, before she went into shock and was taken to the hospital.
And then I helped the medics clean the ambulance. They used a hose. I can still see the blood, and the pieces of brain, as they were washed out of the ambulance and then onto the orange gravel of the hospital parking lot.
And all I was asked to do, again and again, was to tell the story. The human story of the Palestinian people. That somehow, if the West could just see them as humans, they hoped, they would tell their governments to tell the Israeli government to stop killing Palestinians, slaughtering them like sheep, paving over their homes and olive trees, building walls and highways and settlements and more walls and highways and settlements, taking more land and more land and more land, pushing the Palestinians into smaller and smaller enclaves.
But that night, when my shaking hands plugged the camera in to the computer to upload the photos to Indymedia, to tell the story of Ziad Hassan, an innocent man shot to death in his own kitchen by an invading army, I lost my nerve. Because when I opened indymedia, there was a comment that someone had written about someone in Israel who was killed in a suicide bombing, who had to have their pieces of brain picked out of an olive tree with tweezers.
I felt a surge of anger. I couldn't post as an 'objective journalist' that night. I wanted to tell what I had seen that day, wanted to tell how I had scrubbed the ambulance with bleach, I wanted to tell how it felt and looked and smelled and tasted. I wanted to share that I had just that very day cleaned out pieces of brain from an ambulance, that Ziad Hassan was an innocent man, that he didn't deserve to die. That no one deserved to die. That ten Palestinians were killed for every Israeli killed - and their lives were considered worthless by the West. But I lost my nerve. I felt the pain all over my body, from my head to my shaking hands, and I didn't post the story or the pictures I had taken.
And it's only now, 20 years later, with Palestinian lives being lost so quickly, so much death in so little time - over 15,000 in less than two months!!
Only now, I am telling you this story. And I want you to know that Ziad Hassan was a human being. One life is not worth more than another - be they woman, man, child - no life is worth more or less than another. A grieving mother is a grieving mother, anywhere in the world.
Anytime you feel helpless, anytime you feel powerless to do anything to change something (or that the only thing you can do to relieve your guilty conscience is throw money at the problem and make it go away), ask yourself 'who benefits from me feeling powerless in this situation'? These are the wise words of adrienne maree brown, who sat with mothers who had lost children in northern Ireland, who sat grieving with each other and asking "who benefitted from pitting us against each other"?
I listened to an amazing woman the other day, speaking at a sit-in for Palestine. Her grandma was a holocaust survivor. And her grandma had spoken at high schools in the US, had to re-live her trauma over and over again, and then two women whose lives were changed by hearing her story continued her work, telling her story so it wouldn't be forgotten. Because why should a traumatized person have to re-live their trauma just so others can see their people as human? Why has the dehumanizing gone on so long? And yes, white america, christian america I am talking to you. Because it is white supremacy, settler colonialism that started in europe and spread like a cancer all over the world, that brought about the holocaust. And if we don't live up to that, and if we don't stop this cancer, it is going to continue to spread. As the amazing bell hooks taught us, it is a three-headed monster - white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism - and I would add to that christianity in all its many forms (apart from the beautiful dorothy day catholic workers who are truly following the path of their teacher jesus in humility and conscience, and maybe some of the quakers - but both are still stuck in a lot of white saviorist guilt) that is causing all this pain. And if we don't get to the root of it, cut off the heads of the monsters that live buried deep deep in the bottom-most wells of our bodies, it will continue to grow and spread.
ALL children are our children. ALL people are our people.
Freeing Palestine is the first step to freeing us all from the chains of our ancestral, generational trauma that we keep acting out on one another - again and again and again. As my friend Yousef from Gaza wrote in his inscription in the book he helped write ('Light in Gaza') on October 1st, just a week before the current escalation began on October 7th, "Palestine is the test of the conscience of the world." If we can just get it right in Palestine, we can begin to heal all the other wounds that are gaping open, or maybe covered under thin bandages, but seeping just below the surface: from Black liberation in the US, to the Philippines, to Russia and Ukraine, to the Congo, to climate justice worldwide. As I see the explosion of support for Palestine among young anti-Zionist Jews in the US, something I have not felt to this extent ever in my 20 years of involvement in this struggle, I feel that what is being broken open now and forced into the open to heal is an 80-year old trauma - a trauma as old as Netanyahu himself - and it is the shame and humiliation of the Holocaust. And that shame and humiliation turned to hate. And that hate was displaced onto the people whose land was being stolen for the creation and expansion of the state of Israel.
This is not a new phenomenon - My Swedish ancestors settled in Wisconsin, on land that, just 30 years prior, had been Anishinaabe land. They may not even have known or realized that there was a massacre 30 years before they moved to central Wisonsin, where 200 young Anishinaabe men had been killed, shot and hung from nooses, all of them blamed for the rape and murder of a young settler woman (who may even have been killed by another settler, but the Native people got blamed). Collective punishment. A collective punishment which, conveniently, frightened the rest of the tribe into moving off the land and walking southwest to try to get away from the settlers and find a new home for their people.
These cycles of violence have to end. And for us, the descendants of white European settler-colonialists, the generational ancestral trauma is extremely deep. As the late AIM leader/activist/poet John Trudell pointed out (and I'm paraphrasing here): all people were once tribes, connected to the land and the cycles of mother earth. But the tribes of Europe were under attack for 20 generations - for 400 years - with witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades - before 1492 even rolled around.
It's time for a deep healing. For telling the stories. Of Ziad Hassan, of Chukri Dawoud, the little 8-year old boy who was also killed during the two weeks that I was in Qalqilia in 2002 -- shot by the Israeli soldiers on the steps of his home for daring to step outside during the 'Manatijawal' (closure/curfew/house arrest) that the whole city was under during the time that I was there. For the 15,000 stories of Gazans killed in the ongoing bombardment (300 to 700 being killed each day for the past 60 days), for the 1,200 stories of Israelis killed on October 7th. And for the origin stories - the stories that show us the source of all this trauma and pain. The stories of the pain of our ancestors that led us into a century of non-stop world war that began in 1914 with "The war to end all war" and continues to this day.
When we feel the pain, when our tears run together into a river and an ocean of grief, we can make peace. Peace does not come without pain. Because, as that woman speaking at the sit-in reminded us, as her grandmother who survived the Holocaust taught her: "Never again. Not just for us. Never again for anyone."