by: Thaer Thabet
Palestinian Journalist
I do not really understand the time difference between your country & mine. You may also imagine what time means when the sun is the only time indicator in my classroom; I mean my classroom that has no ceiling, yes no ceiling.
Most probably, this introduction is not a courteous one that you deserve. My introduction may sound as embarrassing, distracting or even perplexing, however, my main concern is to tell you about my school, even before telling you my name. The name of my school is; recently “Muntar” named as “Tahadey 2( means Challenge)”. My school does not look like “Swiflion Village”, or like any of New York sky scrapers. None the less, for me this school is even stronger in promoting a robust sense of ambition, resilience & dignity, even though it has no ceiling.
Do you want me to address you just directly with no surnames or titles, should I call you Don??
I do not know whether you like the etymology of concepts especially that my country is like a small “Hamburger Sandwich”. Yet my country’s strident shape looks so much like its rich intense stories that make up its history. It is a great history full of wars, epics, legends, anecdotes, songs, and other things that are not delicious at all.
I mean things that you probably receive every day through your advisors. Let me remind you of only one, ONLY one major thing, which is “freezing settlements”.
This is what I like to have in my state; sorry I mean in the “Muntar” the Bedouin compound where I live. There, I go to my school with my classmates carrying our small hearts & national textbooks.
They claim that out textbooks encourage incitements, incitement? Do you like this concept? Is it incitement when we color our national flag? Do we become instigators when we sing our national anthem? Or draw the flag of our country Palestine.
Don, the only one message that I carry all the time, the message that I love and strongly believe in, the message that you don’t need a team of translators to communicate to you, the message is: “Rise above hate; it is the constitution of our long pathway”