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God påske: Passover, shmassover
Den israelske forfatter Benny Ziffer bidrager med et lidt andet - æh, påskesyn - end vi er vant til at høre fra Det Hellige Land.
Fra Ha'aretz, oversættelse via kibush.co.il:
There is nothing festive in this posting. Passover, shmassover, I hate the holidays because while we celebrate, while us Jews babble slogans about freedom, and fantasize that we are a miserable enslaved nation, we are in fact busy enslaving the Palestinian people. It’s become banal and boring to repeat this a thousand times, but in my eyes, the hypocrisy cries out to the heavens. [The Passover prayer] ‘Oh bread of poverty’ is no longer the bread of poverty of Jews but of numerous Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories, who live off thirty or forty shekels the head of the household manages to scrounge together doing temporary jobs once every few days ...Link, via Sabbah.
(...)
Once in a while the commander of the unit, who seemed slick and devious to me, one of those who will declare at a party a few years down the line that he’s really a leftist, instructed with a nod of his head the use of a water cannon to disperse us. Then the stun grenades began flying. What a disgusting man! How could I say that I belong to the same nation as this commander, who orders stun grenades to be thrown at me, while seemingly unable to wipe a vile smile from his lips. It’s clear to him that I am non-violent, and I will not lift a finger to his soldiers, nor I nor the elderly people I was with, much less the villagers who were even less violent than I was. All they wanted was to demonstrate a symbolic presence near the Wall. One day I will bump into this commander when he is back to civilian life and I will spit in his face(symbolically, of course, not really, because I am not violent like he is).
This is how the Occupation functions. On the front line are good, innocent youth, who could have been my children, about whom I could never say that they are oppressive occupiers. Behind them stands a commander who looks like a marketing executive who cannot harm a fly. And behind him stand all sort of slick-looking youths from the army spokesperson’s office who look like future cinema directors and authors. And even further back behind them stands a water cannon for dispersal of demonstrations. And what’s the big deal about a water cannon - water doesn’t kill. Nor do stun grenades. The whole thing looks like child’s play, and despite all this there is an Occupation, despite all this Hashem lives in a cage, much worse-off than black slaves in the US in their time. All the people of Bil’in can do is go to Ramallah, where the world they can travel freely in stops. All this misery is created by people who look like dorky marketing managers.
So on the night of the Seder, while listening to the dull text of the Hagadah, I will think about Hashem and his family from Bil’in, who fed me a sparse meal, and yet I, even if I wanted to fulfill the commandment telling me to share my food and my home with the needy will not be able to, because of those fences and walls of Occupation separating between us, disguising themselves as elements in an ‘enlightened’ Occupation. And I will think that they are truly my people, not the disgusting officers who look like marketing executives, who destroy my beautiful land with fortified cement.