The Road to Liberty: Keep Smelling like Skunk, Keep Smelling like a Thawri

Call it superstition, call it chance, call it LUCK if you will but there was no denying that the skunk water was after us this Friday at Nabi Saleh. We were even planning from a week before to bring a change of clothes; we were sick of running whenever the skunk truck reared its dreaded aim at us.

So this morning in Nabi Saleh began with a “friend” of ours -whom we wished to avoid for…trustworthy reasons- requesting that he interviews us. We absolutely refuse but eventually decide to join as an unlucky friend was kind of forced to do the interview. Therefore we joined for “emotional support.”

Questions like “What do you wish to achieve from these demonstrations?” and “What is the purpose of these demonstrations, week after week?” are questions that cannot be answered comfortably in a filmed interview with a very untrustworthy human being as the interviewer. The reason for that is mainly because this certain human being was only looking for his own good advantage (as proved at the end of the interview as he tried to fabricate our words to make it seem as if teargas was an occasional thing at Palestinian popular resistance demonstrations, and that skunk water was merely…"water".)

We have no hopes that that interview will ever go just the way it was recorded; it is only logical to think that our words will probably be twisted and turned to suit that certain deceitful human being's..views.

But questions like that, from a pro-Israel normaliser, do nothing but disgust us. Read his views on what it means to be pro-Israel here and here. 

Obviously the ultimate reward, liberty from occupation, did not come that afternoon in Nabi Saleh. Nor will it come tomorrow, or the day after. Yet the fact that victims of the occupation are standing up, resisting, therefore existing, is a wonderful fact: The oppressed are not passive.

"When you don't oppose a system, your silence becomes approval, for it does nothing to interrupt the system." --Mumia Abu-Jamal

And then, one full of disbelief and doubt when it comes to matters of resistance may ask, “But what is the point? Did you free your land? Did you [in the case of Nabi Saleh] manage to get the spring back and halt the settlement? No. So what is the point?”

Whatever happened to having a voice? More importantly using that voice?

Whatever happened to waking from the dangerous lurks of silence and rising beyond the oppressor’s will?

To rise, to wake up, to prove one’s existence, to emphasize one’s complete and utter rejection to the vile oppressor’s loathsome tactics of degrading basic humanity is directly the road to liberation from the criminal occupation, which calls itself…a security measure.

No, it will not come in a day, or a week, or a year…but it will come.

As long as we stand firm on our existence, it will come.

And so when we were chanting at the IOF, the skunktruck proceeded to rear its ugly bulls-eye on us. Its menacing aim missed us, but barely a few times. It jeers at us, takes aim like a sniper, then releases an extremely foul acid, the epitome of the occupation itself.

And so later, when that same “friend” of ours asked us why we kept coming back to Nabi Saleh despite being hosed in such filth, inhaling and suffocating from teargas (and risking our lives as teargas canisters are aimed at head and abdomen level by the oh so moral IOF) keeping watch out for ammunition (whether they be rubber coated or live), we took his question more personally.

Why do we keep coming back, Aziz, despite risking our lives every time? The answer is simple. We have a voice, and we will not put it to waste.