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Palestine, symbol of Struggle. But fighting for what? And against what? In which way? Like God in Islam, the struggle here has 99 different names. Here is a few.
The first is called Survival. This is the man who lives a quiet life in his isolated village in Nablus area. However, every week he leaves his wife and his two children to work near Nazareth, in the 48 territories actually. Every week, he crosses Jenin checkpoint, ingrate and capricious passage that opens and closes at hours apparently unknown to the Palestinians. Every time the surprise to be able to go to the other side of the wall, or to remain stucked there. However, no nervousness, not a word louder than another to describe soldiers who are staring at him with their M16.
His struggle is to make his family live away from all of this, away from the word "occupation", so that their daily life becomes sweeter. His wish is also to provide economic safety to those he loves, because money and jobs only grow there, by using the roots here. For that purpose, he agrees to sell his labour force to the occupier, to contribute to the construction of buildings, roads or railway lines that sign in the landscape the mark of Israeli domination over Palestinian territory .
His struggle is to keep quiet his small voices inside which accuse him to submit to the law of the strongest. It is to silence the part of him that do not agree. It is to endure the judgmental look from one side of the wall and despising from the other side.
The second is Mutation. Well established in Ramallah’s heart, this bookseller sells words for kids’ education and others to talk about the Palestinian cause to foreigners ended up in his shop. Every month he imports books from the whole world, books that take between 4 and 6 weeks to reach him. The reason is still the one of the occupation : delivery procedures with endless delays for products from the ports of Israel until "Palestinian territory".
He claims his right to build a "normal" life in a city that seems to sanitize itself from the evil, to self-convince of its new power and freedom. "The situation, he says, it is fixed in my head, not in my life."
His struggle, today, is no longer through the sometimes brutal activism to which he participated as a student. What he understood is that this way would cause problems for him, not for the occupier. No, today his fight is expressed through economic boycott and political discussions with customers around a tea and a book written by Mahmoud Darwish.
Another is called Rage. It lives in this man and his friends, each one more surprising than the others. He is a cameraman. He does not like his job when he is called to work on a Jawal advertising, a Palestinian cellphone company. He loves his job when he can contribute to documentaries denouncing the occupation of his country. And during his long spare time, he thinks. He makes up stories, sometimes touching, often cynical. His inspiration to write scripts, to film these fictions close to reality, to scream his anger and hatred through video stays tireless. This rage seems to find rest only from the ancient ; this old man relating life before, this fighter from past times when hope was still existing, these ruined houses that testify to his country existence, today more than ever threatened.
He has a singular friend, entrenched in his house-boomker-museum of Ramallah. Together, they become kids again. One invents a scenario about a gang of refugee children struggling with creativity. The other, artist outsider, professional in art-recycling, creates accessories for the movie they will make together: hoover hose, washing machine drum, compass, barbed wire constitute the raw material to create costumes comparable to Hollywood science fiction movies.
At nightfall, the moon as a projector, he takes possession of the sleeping city to make his decor. The shadows he captures are those of another friend, rapper known for the darkness of his words. The clip wants to be as gloomy as the politics they denounce.
His struggle is to contain this impatience to change everything, is to transform boredom into ideas, is to domesticate this rage rumbling inside. It is their struggle too.
There is also Uprightness. It talks about everything, and it talks to everybody. It never disappoints nor stumbles. It lives in a man, a refugee like many, that got his head out of water when he was attracted by the depth. In jail, he saved himself from suffering by leading struggles that were in his poor power, education and political as watchwords. They still are today, and within the association he created, young people are experimenting with him discussion, decision and action against the tide of authoritarianism and ambient inertia. Suited to his revolutionary image, the center is a real laboratory for new ideas. In each of his positions, either for his family, for the refugee camp of which he is a pillar, or for the youth of the world, appears his spirit of justice and freedom.
His struggle talks about everything, about the oppression endured here of course, but also the oppression elsewhere, everywhere and in every way. He is deeply convinced that what is at stake in Palestine is a piece of the anti-social puzzle that gains the planet. For that, he believes that we are all concerned with Palestine, because we are all subjected to the same capitalist and colonialist system, human being destroyer.
And then we find the Strength. The strength of this young woman, just graduated and already involved all over Palestine to share her talent and her enthusiasm. She designs, manufactures, she paints and takes the stage. Armed with her brushes and her vitality that inspires, she has the will to act on her world, to communicate emancipatory ideas to young people and to perpetuate the resistant speech, inherited from her parents.
Born in a village, she grew up in a modest family, cold winter and labour made her daily life. But tiredness is not in her vocabulary, she takes her sisters running paths before going to school, facing some disconcerted or even accusatory looks. She compromises in style between respect of traditions which built her and kicks in codes which subject women.
Her struggle is to desire the Fair for everyone, is to refuse that the occupier oppression hides the one of sexism, is to wish that her society released from its own chains becomes stronger in front of the occupier.
She experiments in her daily existence to live as a free woman, under her tender father’s look. This father who had to face with Israeli jail for calling one of his daughters… Falestine.
A.