They can kill us but they cannot kill Palestine

Last Sunday, on the 15th of May 2011, during the pacific commemoration of the Palestinian and Arab Nakba, Israel publicly executed 11 youth and seriously injured more than 40 others. Israel executed those youth in cold blood, while they were on Lebanese soil. The Zionist executioners chose their victims calmly from among hundreds of unarmed young men and women who were assembled at the Lebanese border with occupied Palestine, behind the fence of Arab shame. They came from the four corners of Lebanon, from the Palestinian camps where they have been locked and isolated from the rest of the world since their birth, from the decaying houses that do not know the sun and from the alleys overflowing with open sewers. They came from a life with no prospects, no hope and no freedom. But many also came from the affluent neighborhoods of the cities and from its elite universities. Some carried a laisser passer (wathiqa), some a UNRWA card, but others had a Lebanese citizenship, and many carried a passport from a western country. They were rich, they were poor, they had papers, they had none, but they shared the same identity: Palestine. They had come to shout it loudly to the occupier, to tell the world that they longed for Palestine, that they will return, that they are ready for any sacrifice to achieve this goal, and that they, Lebanese, Palestinians, Arabs, recognized no other nationality than Palestine. This was their crime: to remember, to belong, to yearn for the land and the sky of Palestine, for the shores of Haifa and the banks of the Jordan River. In today’s world of Arab and Israeli Zionism the sentence for belonging to Palestine is public execution.