To Palestine:

I'm sorry. As a Jewish American I have no words, only numbness-no sensation because I'm afraid that if I feel it will hurt too bad. To know truth is to be in constant agony, constant ache. And I know I have the privilege to keep that away. So I'm not sorry because I know that in many ways I myself am responsible for this terror. How can I apologize when I am a participant?

I don't know how it is possible for the Israeli government to hate so much that innocence is forgotten. These are people; mothers, fathers, daughters, brothers, sisters-and our cousins. These are people, humanity. They have eyes and ears, hearts, lungs, blood that pumps. These are people, they feel, laugh, cry, hurt, love just like we do. Wherever there is oppression we forget that there are people there.

I have no words, only breath right now. I am breathing for those bodies at rest right now. I don't know what to do to change ignorance & hate because it seems so deeply embedded in the psyches of those who have power. Can we replace power with people? With hands? Smiles? Life instead of death? Babies instead of corpses? There is no justification to murder. There is no excuse, no explanation.

I was born Jewish, born Palestinian.

And what about the rest of my Jewish-Americans? Irena Klepfisz says Jews have made the mistake of thinking that to “transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it’s kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression-not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression.”

Where are our voices? Our anger? Are we going to be passive? What if it was us? Is not one of the 10 commandments to love thy neighbor? Sometimes I wonder where God is at in this mess. I'm disgusted that people believe that this war is justified, that violence is acceptable and that retaliation is the answer.

And really we do not know how bad it is over there because we are here and you can't understand until you live it, feel it, breathe it, eat it, sleep it, shit it, cry it.

We can never understand the power, the torture of hate until we are the hated.

In peace,
Leora