Palestine is bleeding: My friend was murdered by Israeli soldiers

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as soon as wrote: “In the event you come again residence alive, as rhyme returns, unhurt, say to your self, thanks!”

Sadly for you, my pal Fawaz Hamayel, you didn’t return to your private home alive. Reasonably, you returned a martyr, carried on the shoulders of your family and friends. Your image is ready for its flip to be added to the murals of your city, Beita, whose mountains embrace your physique, as your soul flutters over its mountains.

We despair, for the partitions on the principle streets of Beita have been stuffed with footage of these killed by Israeli occupation forces – together with a pupil, instructor, college physician and engineer.

Beita, which has a protracted historical past of wrestle, didn’t hesitate to offer its greatest youth to defend its land and expel the settlers, together with from Mount Sabih, which is threatened with confiscation to determine the settler outpost of Evytar.

Final July, on account of the actions of the youth of Beita and their dedication to well-liked resistance, the Israeli military was pressured to evacuate the settlers from Evytar outpost – their buildings, nonetheless, have remained, guarded by the Israeli military.

Beita’s 17,000 residents have paid a heavy worth for well-liked resistance in opposition to the occupiers. In accordance with UN figures, a minimum of 180 folks have been injured by dwell hearth, one other 1,000 by “rubber” bullets and sponge rounds, and over 4,200 have suffered from tear fuel inhalation.

Collective punishment insurance policies have included mass arrests and the revocation of labor permits, whereas Israeli navy bulldozers have razed agricultural roads and destroyed olive timber.

My pal Fawaz Hamayel, we grew up within the blink of an eye fixed. You have been my classmate in school, and my colleague at college. We shared the love of the land, nature and olives. We shared belonging to the homeland on the expense of belonging to any faction or political get together.

You spent the 46 years of your life, together with your three sons, steadfastly on and defending Beita’s mountains. The homeland was your life and your trigger altogether. To cite Darwish as soon as extra, whose poetry and prose I’d hear within the mountains: “The homeland is the eager for demise as a way to restore the reality, and the land. The homeland is just not land, however the land and the reality collectively. The reality is with you, and the land is with them”.

Immediately I miss Fawaz. I search for his face within the faces of different folks, and I’ve the sensation that I’ll catch a glimpse of him within the locations the place I used to see him. I nonetheless don’t imagine that Fawaz was martyred and won’t return, a sense shared by everybody who knew Fawaz. Maybe his highly effective presence, persona, originality, his exercise, is the rationale why these round him don’t settle for his untimely absence.

To maintain on top of things with all the most recent opinions and remark, signal as much as our free weekly Voices Dispatches publication by clicking right here

To Fawaz I say, your reminiscence was a shifting archive for the city of which you grew to become a spokesperson, for Palestine and the world. You befriended everybody and everybody cherished you. Along with your absence, we misplaced an actual and bonafide well-liked chief.

Moreover, after your cold-blooded execution, how will we persuade the brand new technology of Palestinians to undertake the choice of well-liked resistance that you simply defended, believed in and promoted among the many youth of the city?

Right here in Beita, your demise has left us with a way of orphanhood. Superficially, we’re alive and you’re useless. However the fact is that we dwell a lifetime of demise; working after the rainbow, having enjoyable, laughing and crying, carrying our cares, and quarrelling over the wreckage of the world.

Who will cease the bleeding of Beita, the city that resists alone?

Dr Amjad Abu el Ezz is head of the social research division on the Arab American College, Ramallah