This year it didn’t feel that awkward to get the red carnation from a student who said Happy Mother’s Day to me early in the morning, before the 1st period of class. It was sweet, really cute, and the kiss that followed made me overwhelmed thinking of how much things have changed between my students and I. The teacher’s room has a giant wooden table in the middle, and at any given time you can find teachers sitting around it, grading or chatting, or huddling over the heater (toaster oven heater as I call it). This morning I walked into the room to find a giant vase of flowers of all kinds in the very center of that table! It was a gorgeous bouquet dedicated to all the female teachers of the school! And everyone greeted each other with “Kul Sana wa inti Salmeh” May every year be well for you (roughly translated).
I loved it. I love what this feels like. Last year I was so thrown off getting a mother’s day greeting from a student, but this year I graciously accepted it. It’s like a communal recognition to women, for mothers who already are and mothers who will be, and the greeting reaches out to both of them alike.
It was awesome to see one of my closest friends gleam with her twinkling smile at her small bouquet of flowers and it was equally pleasant to walk home with a couple of flowers sprouting out of my purse.
Palestinian TV, for some reason, is a channel that I realize I don’t watch that much (I am usually glued to Al-Jazeera International) but my new roommate and I flipped through it tonight, and what I saw touched another chord. Hundreds of women gathered carrying framed photographs of boys, and men..their sons. The rapid Arabic I’m still not quick enough to grasp when I’m watching a report, so I ask my new roommate what’s going on. “Those are all the mothers of the political prisoners who are in Tulkarem, and they gathered to commemorate mother’s day”. Then there were mothers of professional workers, mothers from different backgrounds, mothers working in different fields, all gathered in the same fashion, with a photograph framed, held in their hands. Some talking rigidly, some with full emotion, some patriotic, some sad, some proud, some blank. I don’t know what this term ‘political prisoner’ means. Why are they called that? From my background, when someone says prison, I am conditioned to think they did something bad (not anymore). When someone says, political, I think super pro-active (not anymore). In the situation and context where I am now, it’s as if all the right people are in the prisons and all the wrong people are out. These men in the prisons did not necessarily do anything political, the fact that they are Palestinian is what is ‘political’.
What is deleted from the dialogue, if there is ever one, about these prisoners is the realm of emotions and sentiments. You want to know anything about political prisoners? Look up statistics, how many women, how many men, and how many children are taken to jail and made to serve months or years for committing no crime at all. They will come in numbers, and the numbers will have years.
There are currently 750 prisoners who are held in Israeli jails without charge or trials. Since the year 2000, 2500 CHILDREN have been arrested. These numbers become numbers, to add to the statistics of 'human rights violations'.
What the numbers, stats, and prison names don’t include is the fact that each and every person who was put in jail without charge or trial was separated from their family, unjustly. Without reason. For an unknown amount of time. And they had to lose years off of their lives. What is deleted from our understanding of political prisoners is the human emotion of a mother being separated from her sons or daughters who are serving indefinite amount of time in prison. The psychological trauma that the family faces, all members no matter how young or old, is not observed. The psychological trauma of that prisoner being released and coming back to a halted adulthood is not observed.
Recently 5 settlers were stabbed to death, and it was gruesome. Instantly checkpoints were shut down and the West Bank was sealed off. 300 Palestinians were detained. Three hundred Palestinians were detained in prisons within a day.
A couple of days later we find out that it was not a Palestinian, but a Thai immigrant worker who had committed the crime. Yet the arrests continue. There are channels and news sources all over the world willing to cover the deaths of the 5, however, rarely any talking about the violations imprisoning, torturing, killing, displacing hundreds upon hundreds.
For more information about Palestinian prisoners : http://www.addameer.org/detention/background.html
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