Cold words on a page or screen can’t convey the reality of certain situations, like innocent people living in fear of being slaughtered. From Cara Marianna at thefloutist.substack.com:
Daily life in a refugee camp.
Snipers in the dark. Occupation forces raid a refugee camp. Screenshot. (Amir, November 2024.)
This piece appears simultaneously in West Bank Alerts.
27 JANUARY—Israel’s attacks on West Bank refugee camps intensified in the immediate aftermath of the Gaza ceasefire. As reported last Thursday by David Hearst for Middle East Eye, this may be prelude to finalizing Israeli plans to “dismantle the refugee camps in preparation for partial annexation.” Since the ceasefire in Gaza was first announced on 12 January, talk among those paying attention has included speculation that Trump may have promised annexation of the West Bank in exchange for Netanyahu’s cooperation in a pre-inaugural pause of the sixteen-month long genocide.
With all of this in mind, I texted an acquaintance I will refer to as Amir to ask about the situation in the refugee camp he and his family call home. In reply, he sent me a series of videos. I publish them here with his permission as documentation of daily life for the estimated quarter million Palestinians living in 19 camps scattered throughout the West Bank.
We already have a fulsome record of Israeli violence against West Bank Palestinians, even if this record is largely missing in the archive of Western mainstream media. These videos document the ordinary, everyday, verging-on-mundane violence camp residents live with from the time they are born. The banality of violence: This is what they show and why I share them in West Bank Alerts. One way to describe my project is to bring us closer to the daily lives of Palestinians—the texture of these lives and what it is like to live them—and in this way humanize Palestinian Christians and Muslims and remove the imposed veil of invisibility.
This first video was filmed by Amir’s fifteen-year old brother this past Sunday, 25 January, at 11:00pm, West Bank time.
Pingback: “The banality of violence.” By Cara Marianna — Der Friedensstifter
Violence is all a commie rat POS understands.
Visions of Russia 1917 in contemporary America.
Survey says… wrong answer.