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I grew up in a large family, the eldest of five children.
When I was 17, my youngest sister was two. If ever I was depressed - as I often was in my late teenage years - she'd cuddle up on my lap and say "Don't worry David". "Don't worry" were some of the first words she learned. She's eight now, but her positive nature still lights up my life.
When I was 21, my second youngest sibling, Grace, was nine. I left for university that year, and when Grace found out about it she spent and evening howling the house down. Each time I'd visit home, when the time came for me to leave, they'd be an outburst of uncontrollable tears. She's 12 now, but she still makes sure she's the first to run and bearhug me whenever I visit.
On 30th December, five Palestinian sisters were killed by an Israeli rocket as they slept in their Gaza home.
Five siblings, still so close that they slept together in the same room. Singer-songwriter Martyn Joseph was so horrified when he heard the news that he wrote about it the next day in his online diary:
"Five Palestinian sisters were killed during an attack from Israel yesterday. Amazingly enough they were lying together asleep when the deadly rocket hit the mosque next door to their flimsy house causing the roof to collapse on them. The eldest was 17, the youngest 4. Their names were Tahir, Ikram, Sarnar, Dina and Jawaher. ‘They grow up day after day and night after night, within a second I have lost them’. Those were the words of their father Anwar Balousha who turned on fellow Palestinians who tried to turn the burial into a political gain saying ‘this is a funeral, not a rally’. He continued saying ‘we are not those who are firing rockets at Israel, we are just people, human beings and not animals’. [...]Martyn channelled his anger into writing a song, which he has made available for free download here.
"Five sisters managed to close their eyes and drift off despite the injustice they lived and breathed on a small strip of land. Just another night for them but it all ended in a second. This enrages me; I know it enrages many thousands of good people. How does this happen? This violence will solve nothing and will only fuel a fire that will continue to burn and bring more violence and loss of life and a greater distance from justice and peace. [...] The world is too small for us to live this way."
Please download the song and share it with your friends.
Also today I received an email that directed me an article by Ellen Cantarow about the situation in Gaza. Although I have some appreciation of what it's like in Gaza, I could never find words to describe it as hard-hitting as Cantarow's:
"Gaza is an immense concentration camp — 1.5 million people squeezed into 140 square miles hemmed in on all sides by 25-foot-high walls separated by a vast expanse of bulldozed earth.If you do nothing else today, please sign this postcard of protest to David Milliband.
"Gaza is still controlled by Israel from air and sea, its entries and exits prisonlike mazes electronically controlled and under constant surveillance. Bombing it, assaulting it with tanks and Uzis, is like shooting animals in a pen. The claptrap about “pinpoint” accuracy and “avoiding civilians” is a lie so flagrant, so transparent, that any child — certainly any Gaza child — could grasp it."
