For someone who claims to use her Gallery as a "vehicle for communication" this writer has experienced some recent (and lamentable) communication failures (mishaps, tragedies, frustrations...).
Subject: my participation in a Code Pink/U.N. supported Delegation to Gaza to celebrate International Women's Day with the women of Gaza and to witness the results of the December/January attacks by Israel on the children, buildings, families, farms, animals, businesses, schools, hospitals, vehicles, and very livelihood of the captive humans on that small strip of land...
Okay, I do see a smidgen of Palestinian-leaning attitude here. However, I didn't have the"attitude" when I embarked on the trip. I was simply curious, adventurous, mildly informed and able to scrape together enough money to make the trip. The attitude definitely built while I was in Rafah, Gaza City and Jabaliya. It continued to build while I participated in meetings with psychologists, relief workers, teachers, lawyers and a wide variety of Palestinians imprisoned by the power of the mightier, the angrier, the crueler Israeli Military. My attitude of the unfairness of it all built in me as my days of witnessing in Gaza passed---wrenchingly, horrifyingly. I was emotionally destroyed by the (first hand) reality of the profound and utter destruction of lives, liberty and the pursuit of basic happiness. But that is not my only area of "attitude."
Not at all!...I have never failed to take into consideration the many Israeli lives that have been greatly harmed as a result of this seemingly endless war of anger, aggression, fear, ignorance and revenge. Revenge! What a futile, senseless way of life! Last week The Santa Fe Reporter published snippets of a long interview with me that a conscientious writer had conducted a few days after my return from Gaza. At one point, she included a list of events from that trip--including my (true) statement that I attended a presentation by two Palestinian women who were arrested and imprisoned (for years) in Israel and...tortured. I didn't make it up. In fact, someone filmed it and I think it can be found on YouTube. The next day, my Staff and I had the unpleasant opportunity of listening to a voice message from an enraged woman--telling me that I had no proof of the torture and that I was causing problems by speaking such nonsense and that I should not meddle in politics and I should stay in my gallery with the horrible grenade. She said she was a woman of peace. And since I too am a woman of peace, I called her to attempt a conversation for clarity. A woman with the same voice as the woman who left the message said that she was the cousin and that the person who called me had gone to Europe that morning and would be gone for months. So...no chance of a peaceful reconciliation there, I guess. At least not for a while. This week The Reporter printed a letter to the editor from a man who seems to be accusing me of not having sympathy for an Israeli family whose 13 year old boy had been "hacked to death by a Palestinian terrorist" recently! He further suggested that my "Code Pink colleagues" and I would not find the torture of a Rabbi and his pregnant wife by "jihadi terrorists in Dubai" reprehensible. Not stopping there, he thinks my colleagues and I would not cry at the horrors of human annihilation in the Sudan. Now, why would he think that my crying over the cruelty delivered upon the of lives and land of Gaza and Gazans (indiscriminate bombing and bulldozing, injuries, death and destruction from white phosphorous) would preclude my crying over cruelty anywhere?! In The Sudan, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Myanmar...wherever the powerful prey on the weak...wherever Evil harms the Innocent...wherever sociopaths and psychopaths harm children and destroy lives, I stand and object. And, I weep!
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