This is beautifully written by a dear friend. I’m aware we don’t often have written pieces here, but as you’ll see, this is incredibly moving. As I write, over 4,100 precious children have been killed in the bombardment of Gaza. Yesterday the U.N. warned Gaza is “becoming a graveyard for children”. Your voice matters. Calling for a ceasefire matters. You can make a donation to to the well respected Palestine Children Relief Fund by clicking here.
[Bio: Erin Adson lives in Dunsborough, Western Australia. She studied in Peace & Conflict studies at the European Peace University and most recently worked running programs for refugee and migrant teenagers. She initially travelled to Palestine/Israel with the Community Peacemaker Teams (formally known as Christian Peacemaker Teams). Currently, she spends her time raising her two young children.]
Friday, 4:30pm, 2023
I shield my face and squint my eyes into the sun.
It’s just edging its way down towards the horizon, hanging heavy and ready to set.
The light is different this afternoon. The sun throws its hazy deep orangey pink onto the trunks of the eucalypts down the valley.
“Bushfire somewhere” I say to my little girl
She is 7 years old with blonde hair, although her eyes are a deep brown.
“I can smell the smoke” she says back
“Me too” I reply, lifting my head after checking the FESA website for bushfire alerts.
“But don’t worry” I say. “It’s very far away from here”
************
I am picking olives in the Northern West Bank of Palestine. It’s November of 2009.
Today we are helping local farmers to collect their harvest on this patch of contested land.
Nearby ‘settlers’ – a term used for Israeli citizens who live within the perimeter of the Occupied Territories of Palestine (this is illegal under international law) have targeted these olive farmers in the past.
My husband and I are back in the West Bank after more than a year away.
It doesn’t escape us the privilege we have, being able to come and go when things get to much.
We get on a plane with our international passports and fly away to somewhere safe. (This is known as freedom of movement)
Previously, we helped do things like documenting human rights abuses, resolving conflicts at checkpoints, or escorting Palestinian children to school, who had to pass by close to Settlements on the way. These children or their friends had been violently attacked by adult settlers in the past, for walking too close.
Escorting them meant that their walk to school was just over 2kms both ways, instead of the 10kms if they took the other path through the rocky hills.
The role is to be an “international eye” – it tends to diffuse the conflicts and results in less violence on the local populations. They call it “The Grandmother Effect” – the theory that there are certain things you don’t do if your grandmother is watching.
*************
I sit next to my grandmother. Her name is Golda. She tells me a joke – she always has a new ones to share, and she tips back her head and laughs, the joy tumbling out of her as it always has managed to do, even with the long life of struggle she has led.
Golda was the first person in the world to ever survive removal of the Thymus gland when she was 16 years old, after a rare condition meant she lost use of the muscles in her arms, legs, and face.
She couldn’t smile for much of her teenage-hood. But by 91 she has more than made up for it.
Her first marriage, to my grandfather whom I never met, was alcohol fuelled and deeply violent.
For a very long time, no-one helped her when she would call for help – because he was a police officer.
People are very frightened to challenge the powerful – even if their actions are wrong.
Among many other stories, she survived many different types of cancer, a total of 9 times.
She even got run over once – by the mailman.
She was a spectacular lady and came from a long line of people who had survived through terrible hardship.
She was raised Fremantle in Western Australia, but the family originally came from Kalisz, in Poland. They were Polish Ashkenazi Jews.
I talk to her about the book she is reading, and she watches my blonde-haired daughter completing a butterfly puzzle on the floor.
I am pregnant with my son, too, but I don’t tell her. It’s just a few weeks too early.
I don’t know it yet, but this is the last time I will see her. She will die in that same armchair two days later, having just made herself a cup of tea and with her book in her hands.
A peaceful passing after a long life. A good death, and one that she deserves.
My sister inherits the Star of David, which grandma always wore on a chain around her neck.
But my sister doesn’t put it on. She’s too scared, she says, to be seen wearing it in a small town.
My little blonde children have Jewish blood in them from both sides.
If we sent away an application, we would all be mailed back our Israeli passport and could immigrate at any time to our new home. It’s the process of Jews returning to their ancestral homelands.
A process called “The Right of Return”
************
It’s a Wednesday morning and I approach the counter of my favourite coffee shop in Yallingup, Western Australia.
It’s in a shacky corner store on the hill of a small surfing town. It’s spring in the southern hemisphere and the skies are clear blue and the waves are perfect.
One of the baristas in the cafe happens to be Israeli.
I catch snips of conversation between her and her co-workers about the unfolding events.
“The problem is that people think there are only two points of view” I hear her say quietly.
Another well-known local hears their conversation too and decides to invite himself in for a bit of man-splaining.
“The other countries just need to take the Palestinians” he says with confidence
“They need to be open to that, if they want it all to settle down” he says confidently.
“They don’t want Israel to act this badly, but they won’t give the Palestinians anywhere else to go!!” he insists.
“They don’t want to go” I think as I walk away
“They want to stay. That’s the point.”
Palestinians do not have the Right of Return. There are generations of Palestinians in the global diaspora who want to move back home to their ancestral homelands, too.
More than half of Jordan is made up of Palestinian refugees, waiting to come home.
But they are not as lucky and me. There is no form for them to fill out, and no passport will come.
“I am just praying for peace for everyone” I hear the barista’s voice trail off as I return to my car and switch on the engine and the radio comes to life;
“It’s day 32 of the conflict in Gaza…” I hear from a reporter
“It’s also day 27571 of the conflict…” I think.
That’s since May 15, 1948 when “The Nakba” started.
Known to some as the Israeli Declaration of Independence – but known to Palestinians as
“The Tragedy”
78% of mandatory Palestine was declared as Israel, 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their villages and homes, and over 500 villages and towns demolished.
Before that, Jews and Arabs all lived together in Palestine, despite popular belief.
**************
It’s October the 8th 2023.
This is the day after the attacks by Hamas extremists.
I try not to check my social media too much. I need to keep it together, for my own children.
Yesterday on Instagram, before I could prepare myself or look away, I accidentally saw a shaky video taken of Hamas militants moving a woman from the boot of a car into the front seat. She is bound at the hands and there is a stain on the back of her pants. It’s unclear if it’s blood or if she’s shit herself in fear. Maybe both.
I message my friend in Tel Aviv. She’s Jewish and was a conscientious objector to the mandatory Israeli military service. We met in Austria when she was lecturing on Peace and Gender for my master’s course, and she since hosted us at her home in Israel.
I am worried how she is. I have sent her a message but so far there is no reply.
I check on Facebook again – was she at that party? I think, my heart thumping, scanning the names again.
So many names. So many names.
I move on to the pictures. So many faces.
Some of them are babies. My insides freeze.
Some of them are entire families.
Some of them look like me.
I don’t see my friend among the list. Although I learn later that she has friends – a young couple – who were kidnapped and are still being held captive.
Finally, days later, a post from her.
“I can’t breathe” is all it says.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
**************
It’s 2009 and we have joined a peaceful walk of locals who wish to protest the Israeli ‘security’ fence that surrounds the Palestinian territories being crept in again, another 500 metres at a small border village. In the process, they have forced out and cut off houses that were previously part of the town. Farmers have been cut off from their farmland, too. They are no longer allowed to cross, their homes and their livelihoods are gone, as well as produce for the town.
We approach the barrier fence – it’s not a giant concrete wall in this section but rather a huge metal fence topped with razor wire, and off beyond a defence tower with soldiers inside.
I hear the crackle of Arabic voices around me. Children and adults both. Someone is carrying a boombox too, through the crowd wafting gentle own the road is a mix of Arabic hits. Suddenly, a cracking popping noise starts up, but it’s not in time to the music.
Suddenly, our noses and throats fill with burning acid.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I grab onto Casper and we try to get away from the source of the pain.
It’s tear gas. The Israeli military has launched cannisters into the crowd.
We spit and cough, eyes streaming tears, and try to get away but it’s in the air and in our lungs and on our skin and we cannot escape it.
Back in Tel Aviv, our Jewish friend sees the photos of the cannisters used that day and tells us that that type of tear gas are illegal chemical weapons under international law.
So too, are the white phosphorous bombs that have been released over Gaza in recent weeks, and now also Lebanon.
I have seen photos of them in release, streaming white ribbons against the sky.
They must not be used against civilians, or against military targets within civilian areas.
They are known for setting nearly anything alight and burn readily with flames of 800 degrees c.
When they make contact with human flesh they keep on burning, through the skin and muscle and down through the bone.
The death is excruciating.
But of course, they wouldn’t do something like that.
Officials have denied the allegations.
**************
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
– Desmond Tutu
***************
It’s just past 1am and I wake up to the feeling of tiny feet kicking me. It’s my baby boy, nearly 8 months old now and stirring for milk. We sleep next to each other in bed. I know these days and years fly by and I want to squeeze out every single moment while they are in front of me.
He latches on and slowly falls back to sleep. Outside, I listen to the wind in the eucalypts and the cacophony of motorbike frogs in the dam down the valley. They are loud at night.
I reach across and grab my phone and check my Facebook Messenger again. I squint into the blue light assault on my senses and see that my friend Amir was active online 45 minutes ago. “Ok, it’s ok.” I whisper to myself. “He’s still alive”
He lives in Gaza.
Amir has five children. Four boys and a girl. For a moment of reprieve from the horror he is living through, we trade recent photos of our kids and talk about their temperaments, which ones are cheeky, which ones are responsible. Who are the deep thinkers and which ones are the class clowns.
Amir’s family all fled the North of Gaza when bombs were dropped on a residential building just nearby to theirs.
Half of Gaza being pushed to flee under the threat of violence. This is illegal under International Law.
“It’s a further land grab, at any cost” he writes “It’s the Nakba again”
“But we will stand strong and hold on to our humanity, and we will keep our hearts stronger with love and support from people like you”
“The bombs are loud at night though”, he says. “The noise wakes the children and shakes the walls.”
I think about our nights, filled with frog song and gentle wind moving gently through the curtains as I sing my baby to sleep.
I wonder which songs they sing to their babies, to keep them calm back to sleep.
Amir was a professor of linguistics at the University of Gaza.
“Was” I think.
Because his entire workplace was flattened last week. This faculty building and office are gone now.
We met Amir when he was living in Melbourne, studying English and linguistics. One of the very, very few Gazans to have been allowed out of their territory.
They may not come or go. The boundaries are fenced and each exit is fully controlled by Israel.
Most are never given passports (which is illegal, under international Law).
We joined Amir for many daytrips around rural Victoria, looking out for koalas as we went.
He cooked us Makloubeh, a traditional Palestinian rice and eggplant dish which means ‘upside down’ – it was his mother’s recipe.
At the end of his PhD in Melbourne, Amir faced a difficult choice – he could apply for asylum in Australia and begin a new life – or, he could go home.
“Back where he came from” if you will.
He chose the latter. He wanted to be near his family, for better or worse.
It’s worse.
Today the numbers are up above 10,000 (Please insert updated casualty numbers here)
“Officials say that 60 Hamas members have been killed.”
Let’s be clear then – assuming that is true, that is a 99.5% civilian toll.
If Hamas were hiding in Israel, the same military strategy would more definitely NOT be deployed.
Also – and rather importantly – nearly half of Gaza is children.
Amir messages me – “We can’t breathe”, he says.
We can’t breathe.
We can’t breathe.
“My family can’t breathe well. With so many bombs in such a small area (Gaza is half the size of Canberra) the air is thick now with cement dust. We try to close the windows but it doesn’t help. My little children are coughing up black all the time”
**************
It’s all black.
I open my eyes and see my daughter’s silhouette standing at the door. It’s 11:14pm
“Mumma” she says
“Yes?” I ask “What’s up?”
“Can I sleep in here tonight? She asks timidly. “….I don’t like the dark”
“Of course bunny” and within seconds she is curled, still on the mattress. I listen to her breath as it drops into more rhythmic breath. She is asleep. I listen to her breathing and close my own eyes, letting the sleep come.
That night, I dream of children. The images are the same ones I have been seeing from Gaza. The images and videos I haven’t been able to blink away from my mind.
These images have had me waking up most mornings shuddering uncontrollably.
My cells recognise what this is. They have seen all of this before. Seen people locked up by fences, unable to leave. Seen chemical weapons used on the masses. Seen murder from direct violence, and starvation. I have seen this before. I know what this is. My body remembers.
In one part of my dream, a father is rocking lifeless babies in a final goodbye. Holding and patting her, just the same as if she was still alive. In another, it is babies and children being lifted from rubble. Confused and bloodied. Some of them don’t move at all.
The only difference to real life, is that in my dream, the children all have blonde hair.
**************
I check Facebook Messenger, again. It’s been more than 24 hours now and Amir hasn’t been online.
I decide once again to go to the list of pictures and names of those missing and killed but it’s not so easy this time.
None of the main media outlets have names or faces of the Palestinian victims.
For my Gazan friends, they get a number instead. 9000 dead. 10,000 dead.
Which number was he?
I try to work out who to contact to ask if he is ok, but then I learn that it’s not just him that’s gone quiet, it’s all of Gaza. A total communication blackout.
Of course, I don’t know this at first and all I can think is that he is somewhere beneath the rubble.
The rubble that cannot be cleared, because the excavators and rescue equipment cannot run, as there is no more fuel.
Families, children, who may still be alive wait under the rubble.
I think of the machines that cannot get to these little kids, because the fuel imports have been banned. A total siege. A 16-year long political strategy taken right to its edge this last month.
I think of my own daughter.
I wonder to myself, if the children under the cement are afraid of the dark, too.
**************
It’s 2020 and it’s the start of Covid in WA.
Everyone is stressed, and scared.
We don’t really understand what is happening, or for how long.
We are separated from our loved one. Our freedoms are being shifted from under us.
Businesses are closed. There are pleas for support from those who can’t afford their rent or food now.
No one knows what is coming next and the stress vibrates off everyone. We aren’t used to bad things happening.
Not here.
A run on toilet paper creates so many waves in supply and demand, and shifts everyone’s behaviour. The impacts were unpredictable and far reaching.
I go to the chemist to find children’s Panadol for my daughter but there was none on the shelves. “Every chemist is the same” they told me. “They’ve run out. The warehouses are empty”
I go home without any medicine.
**************
“The hospitals are running out of medicine”
I am listening to an update from the director of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. They provide many services to Palestinian kids, like mental health support, food relief and fitting prosthetic limbs for those who have been injured.
“There is a massive shortage of so many items required, such as ventilators, and the pressure is only getting worse.”
The PCRF also built the only oncology centre for children in Gaza. “The Dr. Musa and Suhaila Nasir Paediatric Cancer Department in Gaza City”
However, most of the children are no longer receiving their treatments. The staff cannot safely get to or from the hospital, or they have no petrol for transport there. Some have chosen to move south with their own families as the shelling is too constant.
Some inpatient children in the hospital remain. The rest of the children wait at home now, no longer able to receive their chemotherapy.
The hospital is no longer a place that holds hope for them.
Today the hospital is bombed – not the first this month – and the oncology wing is damaged. It is still unclear the death and injury toll among those who were receiving treatment.
Hospitals are one of the places that are safe under International Law. During war, or otherwise. Apparently.
So are schools.
Ambulances.
So are humanitarian shelters.
So too, are places like crowded refugee camps, where the civilian cost of military action is heavier than the miliary goal.
Today a Red Crescent aid convoy was bombed.
It was bringing food, water and medicine across the border from Egypt.
I read a statement by the World Health Organisation condemning the repeated orders for Gazans to evacuate 22 hospitals in the North part of the strip.
Aside from the thousands and thousands of now-refugees taking shelter at the hospitals, who cannot travel due to lack of safety of movement, no fuel, and – nowhere else to go, there are also many who are on ventilators and cannot be moved.
Also, there are hundreds of premature babies in humidicribs.
***************
It’s early March, 2023 and just a few hours ago I gave birth to my son.
The birth was fast and a bit complicated.
But then his breathing became laboured and I am in for a long night, he is attached to machines I don’t understand, and he is screaming as they try to fit a canula into his tiny veins.
I am unable to hold him, so I reach out for his tiny hand and pray.
By morning, the Royal Flying Doctor arrive to transport him to the city for further care.
Sorry, I’m not allowed in the aircraft with him, they tell me.
I sit in our little black car, having received next to no care for myself despite injury from the birth and I drive for 3.5 hours to intercept the airplane at a Maternity Hospital –
I stare at the cows in the fields as we passed by. They have their babies with them still, I notice.
Where was mine.
Where was my baby.
My arms felt empty
Please, I need to be with my baby.
Give me back my baby.
**************
It’s 9 days after the attacks in southern Israel and my friend from Tel Aviv resumes posting.
“Israeli were raped, abducted, murdered by Hamas men. Where is the #metoo movement for these women. Where are the feminist voices? Where is the outrage? “
It reads.
Every other update is simply a shared post – each a plea, from yet another desperate family.
#bringthemhome the hashtag reads.
Their family members have been stolen from them, and their government, from what I can gather, seems deeply inept and utterly failing them.
I see images of doctors, of grandmothers, of young women with their entire lives ahead of them.
And then I see the babies. Babies are not negotiable.
“Give them back” It reads.
Give them back.
**************
I am walking down a laneway with my camera around my neck and a backpack on.
I look exactly the way you might expect a tourist to look.
And I am brand new here, although these streets may find me familiar.
I am in Kalisz, an industrial city in Poland where my Jewish ancestors once lived.
It is beautiful in its own way, but it is definitely not a holiday spot. This town feels rough.
I am looking for family records to complete some more of our family tree.
I put my camera up to my face and point it down the alley way in the old city. I am watching the play of the shadows on the cobble stones.
I hear a shuffle next to me and lower my camera and see a man wobbling past. He smelled strongly of alcohol and mutters something harsh and sudden in Polish. It happened so fast and took me a moment to realise what had just unfolded – he had spat on me.
My shoe was wet and as the bubbly saliva of this man I had never met ran down it, I shrank with shame inside my skin.
I turned around and left the alleyway, quickly finding Casper outside the nearby post office.
I broke down in tears.
As I explained what happened he seemed a little confused as to why I was so deeply impacted.
I couldn’t quite articulate it then but somehow I had gone right back to these same streets but a few generations before me. My relatives, called names, spat on, and rounded up.
I wanted to hide. I didn’t feel safe. And I had never felt so small.
**************
“They’re so small” I think to myself.
I am staring at a shoe. It looks as if it is made of leather, perhaps. It is squished behind a glass wall along with thousands and thousands of other shoes. The one that catches my eye is tiny.
Its previous owner was probably a toddler. Now, it lives on permanent display at Auschwitz camp 1.
This isn’t the first concentration camp we have visited. We are up to number 5 now, and it’s getting harder each time. We are not holocaust-hopping for some macabre tourism adventure. It’s very hard for me to be here. But we are researching our family trees and, sadly, a lot of the branches end in these places.
I pull my eyes away from room of shoes, and wander past the room full of hair.
“Never again” I hear the words tumbling around in my head.
I turn a corner and try to avert my eyes, away from the room full of prosthetic limbs, and gold teeth.
I need to get out.
Never again. Never again. Never again.
***************
It is 2007 and I am walking the streets of Hebron, a city in the West Bank of Palestine.
We have been staying in the old city. It was once a vibrant marketplace full of Palestinian locals selling fruit, drinking sweet tea and sitting on milk crates playing backgammon.
The air would have been thick with smells of flatbread, dried sage and Zaatar. But the Israeli settlers moved in – or in this case – on.
The right-wing Zionist Jewish settlers here have literally built their houses on top of the ceilings of pre-existing Palestinian homes right along the marketplace. The Israeli military then placed checkpoints on all sides of the market.
The result is a marketplace with no customers as the process of passing a military checkpoint every time you wanted a bag of tomatoes, unsurprisingly, slowed trade down to a halt.
The Palestinian family next to the apartment we are staying in, has had their front door blocked off by the construction of an Israeli-only road. It allows the Israelis that live in the settlements nearby to get to and from their towns. Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads. Their cars are identified with a different colour numberplate so there can be no confusion.
If our neighbours were to walk out their front door and onto that road they would be arrested or shot. One time their nephew, aged 11, was caught in the wrong area. He got off lightly. Instead of being shot or arrested, his mouth was filled with rocks and forced shut, shattering his teeth.
These sorts of stories, we come to understand, are not rare.
Instead of using their front door, they must access use an upstairs window and scale down a ladder in order to access the back alleyway. This is how they now take their youngest child to kindergarten. The grandmother, who just last night cooked us the most beautiful meal of Sumac chicken and rice, struggles with the window-ladder house exit now that her hips and knees are failing her.
She tends to stay inside as much as she can these days and limits the occasions that she needs help to climb out of the window for shopping. or to see friends.
Since the Israeli road was built, the Palestinian farmers who tend the land across the road may not cross in order to access their olive groves. Instead, they must travel 20kms further up, to a checkpoint in which they are scanned and processed and one a good day, allowed to cross over. They then begin the 20km trip back down again on the other side, in order to start their day of farming – a mere 20 metres from where they had started.
Their story is not unusual. “This is life under occupation” they tell me.
As I walk the market, I see that a few shops still open, although we are the only customers to be seen.
An act of defiance, they tell me while offering me sweet black tea in tiny glasses and plying me with flatbreads and pomegranate juice. They refuse payment, although I try to insist.
“Hospitality matters to us” they say. “It’s who we are. You are welcome here. Thank you, thank you for coming”
The only power they have to resist the military occupation, they explain, is to continue to exist.
Up against one of the biggest militaries in the world – their water, imports, food, internet, power all beholden to the State of Israel – these normal Palestinian families have no way to stand up for their rights to exist peacefully in their land, except to do exactly that.
“Quiet steadfastness” they say. Existing is our resistance. We call it “samoud”
Customers or not, they would open the shutters of their shops, and wait.
As I walk down the empty street I glance up. Above me is a giant net, strung across the street at ceiling height. It travels the entire length of the market, and it is filled with rubbish.
The Israeli settlers who moved in on top of the Palestinian homes have a habit of throwing their rubbish from their windows and onto the streets of the local marketplace below.
Eventually, the Palestinian shop owners erected the net, in order to keep the market streets clean.
Clean.
Cleanse.
Cleansing.
****************
Ethnic Cleansing
… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
The Commission of Experts also stated that the coercive practices used to remove the civilian population can include: murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, use of civilians as human shields, destruction of property, robbery of personal property, attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, and locations with the Red Cross/Red Crescent emblem, among others.
The Commission of Experts added that these practices can “… constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.”
****************
“How are you … with all the stuff in the middle east?”
My best friend asks me. She knows I am probably not ok.
She is correct.
“They U.S. vetoed, against a humanitarian pause in Gaza. Not even a ceasefire. A humanitarian pause. And they are sending more bombs over….
I don’t know how to raise my children in a world like this one.” I say “Do I tell my little girl what is happening? Or, do I let her believe that humanity is mostly good? She’s so little… ” I reply.
I’m so sorry, she says.
“I am hurting too because the Israeli government is desecrating the memory of my ancestors who were victims of ethnic cleansing in the holocaust.
Their deaths mean something if the human lesson is to never, ever forget, and never, ever repeat that sort of behaviour.
But Israel is …. doing the same things over.
Not only are the murdering my Palestinian friends, they are murdering my Jewish ancestors over again.
***************
“If your God needs a war that kills children for some future to arrive, I hope it never comes”
– Jarrod McKenna
****************
It’s 7:45pm and I scan my phone again.
Facebook messenger Amir was active 14 minutes ago.
“Good.” I think. “Not dead”
I am sitting with my laptop on my knees, typing and trying to untangle my thoughts.
Some parts feel hazy and unclear, my identity feels swirled up, my griefs are all mixed up, like colours on a palette being swirled together, with a brush that isn’t clean.
I’m not sure how to pull them apart again.
Usually, it’s easy to just choose your hue, pick a colour (or a side) – and paint a picture of those shades.
But increasingly, my paints are all muddled together, and the rainbow has long since disappeared.
I am starting to see that I have no choice but for my painting to be all the shades of brown.
I saw a meme once, of a crowd of Germans standing and listening to Hitler during a political speech in World War 2.
Everyone in the crowd had raised arms, in support, or under pressure to go along with the majority. Perhaps too afraid, for themselves and their families, not to. They are all holding their arms up in a “Heil” salute.
Among the crowd is one man, standing, largely unnoticed with both arms folded across his chest.
At the time no one saw him – but history scoured the records and now, lucky fellow, he is Facebook famous.
There was a circle drawn around him.
“Be this guy”, the caption said.
**************
It’s been a few days since the bushfire, and the smoke has cleared now.
Tonight is clear and dark and the air is that musty, crisp, cold kind, that makes you feel like it’s sweet to breathe.
The sounds of the motorbike frogs drift up the hill.
My daughter bursts through the door to my room.
“OK, I have brushed my teeth.” She says. “I used the funny black toothpaste”
She sees her baby brother asleep next to me, and the laptop perched on my lap
“What are you doing?” she asks
“I am just writing some things”
“What about?” She’s always been so inquisitive
“I…. I am writing about some bad things that are happening to some people who don’t deserve it.”
I see a small crease appear between her eyes and she peers out the window to outside, looking off to the horizon with concern.
“Don’t worry” I say. I hesitate, but I also don’t want her to worry. She deserves a hopeful, free, and peaceful childhood.
“It’s very far away from here.”
**************
Immediate Ceasefire.
Bring the hostages home.
Stop killing children.
This is not a controversial opinion.
Never Again… is now.
You can make a donation to to the well respected Palestine Children Relief Fund by clicking here: https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/pcrf1/campaign.jsp?campaign=2532&fundraiser=560072&&isComplete=complete