Eduardo Galeano: "If I were Palestinian..."
by NINJA
translated by Marianna Olinger
Eduardo Galeano, for Brasil de Fato
July, 14th , 2014 — Since 1948, Palestinians have been condemned to live in perpetual humiliation. They cannot even breathe without permission. They have lost their homeland, their earth, their water, their freedom. They have lost it all. They don't even have the Right to choose their government.
When they vote for whom they are not supposed to vote, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It has been converted in a mousetrap since Hamas won - suffice to say, fairly - the Palestine elections in 2006. Something similar happened in 1932, when the Communist Party won the elections in El Salvador.
Bathed in blood, Salvadorans atoned for their bad behavior in electing the Communists, and have lived under military dictatorships ever since. Democracy is a luxury not all people deserve. The offspring of helplessness are the rockets fired by Hamas militants who, trapped in Gaza, aim at the land it once belonged to them and that was usurped by Israel.
And desperation, on the verge of suicidal madness, is mother of bravados that deny Israel's Right to existence, shouts deprived of efficacy, while the much more effective extermination war has been denying, for years now, Palestinians' Right to existence.
