It was after a trip to Palestine, for the first time as an adult, when I decided that I must do my part in showing others in the world what is going on in actual fact on the ground to Palestinians. However, I wanted to do it in a way that was not just “news,” but would resonate with people on a deeper and emotional level.
When you visit occupied Palestine you come to realize how widespread, systematic and institutionalized the oppression actually is. The illegal Israeli settlements that emerge from hilltop to hilltop is shocking. From afar they appear simply like nice affluent neighborhoods, but when you recognize that they have no right to be there in international law, that they sit upon stolen land, that all the brutality and oppression that surrounds them like the soldiers, the checkpoints, the Wall, the permit systems, the water shortages, the home demolitions, the destruction of farm lands, and much more that Palestinians have to deal with every day, is BECASUE of those settlements and that the government of Israel encourages and supports them and considers them part of Israel, as well as being the guardian of the Apartheid system that serves those settlements, then you feel truly shocked and deeply saddened.
Palestinians are treated one way because they are Muslim and Christian, and Israeli settlers another way because they are Jewish - That is the Palestine I saw.
This short film, Today They Took My Son, is based on a UNICEF report and is about a mother coping with her young son being taken away by a military system. Her helplessness to prevent the cruel and inhumane treatment she knows he is experiencing is more than any mother can bear.
Right now with all the tensions around Trump’s Jerusalem announcement, we have seen a number of Palestinian children in the news being taken by the Israeli military, including 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the girl from Nabi Salih who was arrested for slapping an Israeli soldier. She is one of around 10,000 Palestinian children taken since 2000 by the Israeli military whose stories do not reach the news and the painful story I tell in this short film is usually the same for each one of them.
There is simply no context in Western main stream media’s reporting of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Context is everything. Context is a decades-long illegal occupation. Context is checkpoints, home demolitions, the blockade of Gaza, the Wall, settler violence, illegal settlements, military brutality, permit systems, child prisoners and more. Without context, their reporting is misleading and meaningless and as such Palestinian revolt, resistance and even violence is framed as barbarism, terrorism and baseless hatred, rather than resistance to illegal occupation, legitimate struggle for freedom and rejection of the theft of their lands and the inhumane treatment they are subjected to.
I am very fortunate in that my parents ended up in the UK in the early 70s and made a good life for us there. I do not yearn to live in Palestine personally, but I would like all Palestinians to have a choice to visit if they wished and live there if they chose, instead of squalled refugee camps and statelessness. My story is far more fortunate than most and for that I am grateful - which is why I feel even more compelled to do the work I am doing.
I think it also shows the Palestinian Authority to be totally powerless and they should end their complicity with Israel, working to simply keep Israel secure while receiving nothing positive in return for Palestinians except their own personal incomes, and given the Oslo Agreement is clearly dead. They should hand back the full occupation to Israel with all the headaches and expenses that it involves instead of allowing part of it to be outsourced to them.
A two-state solution wasn’t a bad idea but with this recent Jerusalem move, among other actions, one can clearly see that Israel has other plans. Many of us knew this already, but for the first time, those not so familiar with the conflict can clearly see the imbalance and unfairness of such a unilateral, unapologetic and arrogant move by Trump.
