February 21
14-Year-Old Lama From Gaza Gives A Speech Before Congress
Lama is a natural when it comes to presenting her point of view. She is a writer who thinks about images, and she is bright enough to be able to do that in a second language as well.
Perhaps her most moving story was her plan to start a dairy farm in Gaza. The sheer impossibility of such a thing doesn't really stop her dream. We as adults know that the Israelis will only crush anything that the Palestinians try to do for themselves. The IDF destroys all sorts of farmland in Gaza and the West Bank. But a dairy farm? Why, they would shoot the cows and blow up the barns.
So it is not the dairy farm that is so moving. It is who it would feed: her friends and relatives who don't get enough to eat, much less milk, cream and butter. Lama would feed Palestinian children because she knows just how desperately they need it. It breaks one's heart; there is no getting around it.
Why does Israel create such misery in children? It seems as if two thousand years of discrimination has been condensed into one murderous state, doomed to reenact a genocide, but playing a different role this time. The role of murderer.
What is our excuse, living here in the "land of the free"?
