by : Ahmad safi
My friend Wael from Gaza, says, “We are counting the shells one by one. My daughter Lama hugs her cat and waits when the next strike will hit the house. My children, the displaced people we hosted, and the cat are all in the house. Whenever the bombing intensifies, my daughter tries to cover the cat with her body, trying to protect it, when calm returns again. The cat moves away and tries to play with others, and we begin to distinguish from the cat’s panic that the planes will now bomb the vicinity of the houses. The cat rushes to my daughter Lama’s arms, so we know that death is coming. The windows in the house are broken. Previously, we kept them closed so that she would not escape outside. Now, there are no windows or doors in the house, and the cat does not leave the house. We lit the last door of the house to prepare bread, the only food available to us now. The cat shares with us its share of only one meal a day, which is a piece of bread.”
Ghazi from Jenin exposes his “neighbor” street dog, who eats leftover food from homes given to him by mothers or children. The dog was not named, did not live in the house’s bed, was not pampered, was left in its environment and was not forced to change its innate behavior. The dog was injured by shrapnel from a drone that broke his thigh. The event happened in the middle of the night. The rest of the young men were trying to escape from the drones that kill everything that moves. Ambulances were trying to reach the cemetery where the plane exploded and injured five camp residents, and the neighbor’s dog that was in the place. The dog also defends his area, trying to use his innate senses against the methods of killing and destruction used by the occupying state to eliminate the Palestinian presence, Ghazi did not try to prefer one creature over another. Ambulances and some of the young men tried to reach the place to save the wounded and evacuate the martyrs, and Ghazi and others paid attention to treatment of the dog. One of the paramedics was able to find time for the dog to provide first aid, as is the case with the rest of the injured humans.
The next day, he called me asking for help in what was best to do to save the dog’s leg. He was unable to get him to Ramallah, where help was available, due to Israeli checkpoints, but the veterinarian was able to save his leg, and he is now recovering.
No one has the right now to formulate concepts according to the race or level of civilization that he grants to himself, or to develop scientifically and culturally based on his own evaluation, whether as individual researchers or societies, and the scientific references he read or composed in prosperity will not give him the right to continue them in all situations that happen to humanity. In the East, we have always received texts ready to be applied on the grounds that they are a human concept of rights and freedoms, and now Palestine presents another civilizational model that is completely different and based on real experiences, human suffering, persecution, discrimination, and ethnic cleansing. This model is advancing with the support of the free people of the world who knew Palestine and its people closely and lived with them, and now they are transporting Palestine to the hearts of the free people of the world.
My friends have never heard of the philosophies of welfare or animal protection, nor of the concepts that are discussed in welfare gatherings here and there. They live this philosophy in the tiniest moments. Part of it was written imaginatively in the past, and part of it has not reached the imagination of researchers in terms of merging, identifying, and unifying it among creatures.
The neighbor’s dog, which used to bark at me when I passed in front of him, has now stopped barking. It only started barking when it heard the sound of bullets coming from the Israeli military checkpoint, which is 200 meters away from my house. It started alerting us whenever soldiers or settlers approached the houses near the checkpoint.
The concepts of human rights, the application of which is monopolized by one color or race to the exclusion of others, must be abolished. The new trend in the world led by free people in the world will inevitably become dominant. The current discrimination in the application of rights, where for some animals are more important than humans, or for others, Humans are more important than animals, or there are humans who are better than others, there are humans who are preferred over others, deeper concepts must be rebuilt and based on the Palestinian experience, which now leads the world and reminds it of the nations that were previously exterminated, the Aborginals in Australia, the First Nations, Inuit and Metis in the Americas, the Armenians and Kurds, entire peoples wiped out of existence, and now these peoples, along with the rest of the free people in the world, the fighters, are reviving the fire in these cultures, and reformulating new concepts different from what was imposed on us over the past century.
The international formulations of the current regimes and institutions are post-World War. The third does not serve the peoples of the world, but rather aims to domesticate and tame them, and the mechanisms for dealing with laws in these countries must be completely different and rise to rejection, boycott, and uprising against them in order to change them.
Let the people of Palestine, humans and animals, trees and mountains, be fuel for the world’s revolutions and a torch for the civilizations that were annihilated, so that they may rise again. Let us return to the earth in complete harmony. Despite how difficult these years will be for the people, they will prevail. Freedom for the beings, freedom for the land, freedom for Palestine, freedom for the peoples of the world.
After the war, we will change major concepts of our institution to suit the concepts of liberation for the inhabitants of the planet, regardless of their races, religions, or shapes. After the war, we will pick up our wounds, our pieces, and our old concepts, and bury them, to begin again…..
