In some parts of the world the neighborhoods I've come to know have transformed because of development, with the buildings getting bigger and fancier. That happens a lot, in a lot of places. When it comes to the places I've visited before in Lebanon and Palestine, they change in another way. They are destroyed.
One of the places I visited in Lebanon in 2005 was the old prison the Israelis used to run called Khiam Prison, located in south Lebanon, right on the border with Israel. An ex-prisoner showed us around. The most memorably horrifying feature of it was the cage he showed us, in which the caged cannot sit or stand. In the 2006 war between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, the old prison was bombed to pieces.
In the news yesterday repeatedly, something about three presidents of elite universities going somewhere to talk about antisemitism. I kept waiting for the news readers to mention the three Palestinians from three different elite American universities who were just shot while walking down the sidewalk in Burlington, Vermont, one of whom is now paralyzed. But no, no mention, different script.
Those three young men all went to secondary school at the Friends School in Ramallah. It has the reputation of the Friends School in Washington, DC, where the Obama kids went, it's a fancy place. It's also the place where I had my biggest audience when I was doing concerts around the Occupied West Bank in 2005.
I first heard about the Jenin Creative Cultural Center around the time of the Second Intifada, the wave of resistance among Palestinians within the Occupied Territories and beyond that gave rise to quite a bit of global solidarity, represented in the US by such acronyms as ISM -- the International Solidarity Movement. The cultural center in Jenin was and is a local center of activity, where activists from overseas would naturally get involved with things.
I suppose I had a particular interest in seeing Jenin up close because the city, which translates roughly to paradise, was the subject of a song I had written after hearing about the terribly deadly and destructive Israeli military attack on the refugee camp there in 2002, which destroyed hundreds of homes and took scores of lives.
Seeing the little cultural center up close was happening because it was one of the nine or ten other locations where I was playing music on that visit. I met the director then, and we've been sporadically in touch ever since. Today I received an email from him, which I thought I'd share.
Salam dear brother David,
Sending you lots of love and respect for your kindness and your support and solidarity with Palestine.
From Jenin, which you visited a long time ago, this city that welcomed you and listened to your music.
From Jenin, that has been targeted every day by the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces], which has killed hundreds during the last two years.
Jenin, that carried the name of Paradise, has become under this occupation, Hell.
In the last three weeks we lost some members of our cultural center, who were part of our activities. One of them, Dr. Shamikh Abu Al Rub, 25 years old, was killed in very cold blood, while he was trying to treat his brother, who had been shot by the IOF.
He got two bullets in the chest to kill his dreams. His father is the Jenin deputy governor.
Jenin city and Jenin refugee camp have become like a city of ghosts. Most of the streets have been bulldozed, and it's impossible to move around. The health care system been destroyed by using force -- by targeting the hospitals and ambulances and their staff.
Genocide in Gaza -- no words can describe what's happening there.
I hope you and all your friends around the world will stand to support our hospitals and our cultural center activities, as we are trying to help children to overcome all of this suffering.
Sending you lots of love from Jenin,
Yousef
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