New Knesset Member Visits A Friend In Ramallah: 'This Is Not Normal'
Adi Koll, a relatively unknown Knesset member from Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party, posted this picture along with an uncharacteristically long and emotional status on Facebook, the day after she paid a visit to the home of a Palestinian friend in Ramallah. (Translated in full below)
By Noam Sheizaf |Published April 21, 2013
Warning! This post will be long, controversial and without color photos, even though I have plenty of photos. I made sure to take pictures throughout the day with the intention posting them to Facebook so I can show what we would all rather forget. But now it feels pointless. No picture can describe what I’ve been through, and even if it could, it wouldn’t achieve anything but to ease the conscience of the viewers. There, we saw it, now we know what they go through. We don’t really need to do anything with that.
Well, you have no clue!
Even if I post a picture of the dirty, frozen compound at Qalandia Checkpoint that I passed yesterday on my way back from Ramallah, you wouldn’t be able to see and surely you wouldn’t be able to feel the humiliation and insults, like the permit-holding Palestinians who have to pass through it day after day. You won’t be able to hear the soldier who was barking at us (“Knesset member? Which Knesset exactly?”) through the sealed glass, demanding that we go back and forth, again and again for no reason at all. And there is no picture and no film that could explain the absurdity, according to which Qalandia, which is part of the Jerusalem Municipality (and its residents pay municipal taxes) does not receive basic services from Israel because it lies beyond the checkpoint, nor from the Palestinian Authority, because it’s outside their jurisdiction. A whole neighborhood which is now a no-man’s land.
More importantly, a picture can be misleading. If it’s an image of the bright and renovated Muqatah, which without much success tries to portray stability of governance, or [a picture] of the city of Rawabi – an artificial architectural catastrophe which aims to sell the Western bourgeois dream to the Palestinians – a four-bedroom apartment with windows on three sides – and thus silence their cries.
No picture. Not one picture would be able to tell the story of my dear friend Amjad. A businessman, who was born in Nablus and lives in Ramallah, married for a second time and father of three children (classic middle class), who lives under countless restrictions but insists that he lacks nothing except the safety of his children. Last week, his two boys came home and told him that during a football game in the neighbourhood they heard “this thing that soldiers used” (radio). Along with some of their friends, they decided to follow the voices until they “discovered” the soldiers, and then all together, threw stones at them.
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http://972mag.com/new-knesset-member-visits-a-friend-in-ramallah-this-is-not-normal/69749/
