استغرب كيف تتحول الأشياء الضعيفة، حتى الكلمات إلى أشياء شريرة، من دون رحمة، من أجل بلوغ السلطة على الرغم من المنطق والتاريخ.

For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme. [...] Our sadness can make the stones weep. And the way we love is no exception.

I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.

كيف يمكن ألا يستطيع الإنسان أن يسير إلى ملكه الخاص؟ أن يزور قبر زوجته؟ أن يأكل ثمار أربعين جيلاً من كدح أسلافه من دون أن يعاقب بالموت رمياً بالرصاص؟ على نحو ما، لم يكن هذا السؤال الفجّ القاسي قد نفذ سابقاً إلي وعي اللاجئين الذين شوشتهم أبدية الانتظار، معلقين آمالهم على قرارات دولية نظرية

Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?

لو لم أكن أعرف الشهامة الدائمة لدى الناس في المخيم، لخَشيتُ أن أكون هناك وحدي بعد حلول الظلام.

But in our camp, his story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land.