Ahmed

“How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“They are building the wall," said Nidal, "so they don't have to look into our eyes.”
― Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

“Disinformation is in part the cause for what Hannah Arendt once called the curious mixture of “gullibility and cynicism” of voters in modern politics. Disinformation, she suggests, helps create the strange circumstance in which people “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.” That is the goal—that there’s no empirical reality that we can all agree on. The ultimate danger is not that lies will replace truth, or that disinformation will substitute for factual information, but rather that the distinction between the two will evaporate—that the very idea of trying to discriminate between fact and fiction will no longer be a feature of our mental landscape. Then we would truly be living in a world where everything was possible and nothing was true.”
― Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It

“That an Israeli soldier could bulldoze 189 olive trees on the Land he claims is part of the "God-given Land" is something I will never comprehend. Did he not consider the possibility that God might get angry? Did he not realize that it was a tree he was running over? If a Palestinian bulldozer were ever invented (Haha, I know!) and I were given the chance to be in an orchard, in Haifa for instance, I would never uproot a tree an Israeli planted. No Palestinian would. To Palestinians, the tree is sacred, and so is the Land bearing it. And as I talk about Gaza, I remember that Gaza is but a little part of Pales tine. I remember that Palestine is bigger than Gaza. Palestine is the West Bank; Palestine is Ramallah; Palestine is Nablus; Palestine is Jenin; Palestine is Tulkarm; Palestine is Bethlehem; Palestine, most importantly, is Yafa and Haifa and Akka and all those cities that Israel wants us to forget about.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back