The Suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza

The late Edward Said was a prominent Arab American. He was for decades a distinguished professor at Columbia University, New York. For a while he intellectually participated in framing the plight of the Palestinians. He was born in Palestine and spent most of his life in the USA. He recently died of cancer in New York City.
The suffering of the Palestinians and the current focus on slaughtering the Palestinians, destroying their homes, schools, mosques, in Gaza is not new. Edward Said wrote the following in August 2002, which I received via email from The Friends of Sabeel—North America. “Sabeel” is an Arabic word which means “The Way.” It is the voice of the Palestinian Christians. Sabeel has friends all over the world and they include Muslims and Jews.
"Every Palestinian has become a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified fence on three sides: imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to
Israeli planes and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare.

Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains.

Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli "insecurity." The whole world must sympathize, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities, and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged in a "cycle of violence" that has to be stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while we ought to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country: the other is a stateless dispossessed population of people without rights or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life has been either hijacked or so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture - slowly, fastidiously, inexorably.

That is the truth of what Palestinians suffer."

Edward Said
August, 2002