Noran Iyad Deeb.
posted by Laila @ Monday, February 13, 2006
Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother
I am a Palestinian from Gaza. I am a journalist. I am a mother. I am a Muslim. This blog is about the trials of raising my children between spaces and identities; displacement and occupation; and everything that entails from potty training to border crossings. My husband is a Palestinian refugee denied his right of return to Palestine, and thus OUR right to family life. Together, we endure a lot, and the personal becomes political. This is our story.
About Me
- Name: Laila
- Location: somewhere between the seas, Gaza Strip, Palestine
Journalist, mom, occupied Palestinian-all packed into one.
Previous Posts
- Be to her, Persephone…
- Desperate dreamer
- Aerial seige continues
- Yousuf with a duckling in Nuseirat camp's Tuesday ...
- Gaza under aerial siege
- A Palestinian farmer in Beit Lahiya holds a pictur...
- In times of Israeli closure, breastfeed!
- Sucks to be you...
- Where the Sidewalk Ends
- A momentous day (but miles to go)
15 Comments:
May Nora rest in peace and may her former schoolmates live peacefully.
Robert: this is Laila's personal blog and she's a Palestinian living in Gaza.
Laila,I should say that your Blog it´s very Ok,and I understand that it´s your PERSONAL Blog,but I think that maybe you should start to answer the questions,that your readers do to you sometimes.
That should be helpful to us to understand what you really think.
As far as I read you always show how much those ISRAELIS do not let you sleep,do not let your people work (in Israel of course),does not let you cross the border.
For me it looks like that you have also only hating in your heart. Am I right?
There´s no another point of view,only that Gaza would be a Paradise,if there was no Israelis.
And as much as I read ,in another Blog from someone who tried to live in Gaza,it is not exactly like that.
http://www.living-in-gaza.blogspot.com/
Just try a litlle bit to answer the questions sometimes,so maybe we could understand a little bit better.
And by the way,it´s so awful to expose a photo from a dead child this way.
There is nothing wrong, and much right, in posting these sad pictures and this story. Laila writes from her heart, as is her right, and I am glad she can write with such clarity and beauty in the midst of such sadness. May Noran's family and friends find comfort; I am certain the little girl herself has found peace.
The PA Ministry of Education’s textbooks portray Shahada as an ideal. For example, "The Poem of the Shahid" extols yearning for death, and includes the words: "I see my death, but I hasten my steps towards it…" It appears in schoolbooks for grades 5, 6, 7, and 12. a dead child appearing in a textbook published in September 2001, teaches the children to identify a child as the one who is yearning death.
"Ask for death" is the message that the Palestinian Authority [PA] has been conveying to its children since the start of violence in October 2000. In June 2002, two articulate 11-year-old girls were interviewed in the studio of official Palestinian Authority TV. Among other topics, they spoke of their personal yearning to achieve death through Shahada – Death for Allah – and of a similar desire they said exists in "every Palestinian child." It is striking that their desire for death was expressed as a personal goal, not related to the conflict with Israel. Having been convinced that dying for Allah is preferable to life, their goal in living is not to experience a good life, but to achieve the proper death – Shahada.
THAT´S SADNESS!
She is in the jannah inshAllah. I don't know what it is like to live in a country under occupation and continuous suffering. May Allah take you from darkness to light soon.
"Living in Gaza" is ONLY my point of view as a swedish national trying out Gaza. My view is not at all necessarily the most correct one (in fact it would be strange if it was, since I only lived there for a short period of time. Laila for example has a lot more insight, knowledge and contacts to give a thrustworty image and in the same time personal) and I have made a delibarate choice in my blog to focus on my personal difficulties as well as some positive experiences. I perhaps don't BLAME, but that doesn't mean that I'm not against the israeli illegal occupation of palestinian territory. However I ALSO have the opinion (sometimes very unpopular among SOME of my palestinian friends) that peace is possible and both parties have to make some compromises to reach that. There are no winners in war.
To my experience many Gazans are "blind" (however they would mostly have to be deff) to the situation and their own responsibility to it. An ordinary Gazan might not be able to stop the F16's but they certainly would be able to stop throwing carbage on the streets or stop beating of children.
I think that each blogger have the right to answer or not answer as he or she likes. Perhaps it's a choice on Laila's behalf NOT to answer. In the blogospeare we all complement each other. Read some of my blog, her blog and others and the puzzle might be more clear (or not...).
Sometimes I get the feeling that it's less ok for a wellspoken palestinian to "complain", than for an israeli.
Well, doing my best to spice up your comments-section, Laila.
//Imaan of "Living in Gaza"
Laila just emailed me saying that she is unable to come inside blogger.com since two days (someone else has posted for her) so she CANNOT comment.
//Imaan
Didn't it turn out that Noran Deeb was killed by a Palestinian pilgrim who was returning from the hajj and fired celebratory shots into the air?
No, that's what the Israeli army said at first to divert attention. That claim turned out to be false, and the Israelis never finished their so-called "investigation". Unfortunately since she was not an Israeli child, her life was worth less for the media.
And please see my comments in previous posts in response to the "textbook" theory.
Unfortunately since she was not an Israeli child, her life was worth less for the media
- for whose media do you mean, Laila?
"The PA Ministry of Education’s textbooks portray Shahada as an ideal. For example, "The Poem of the Shahid" extols yearning for death"
Of course there's nothing like that in the West:
"Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred...
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die....
When can their gory fade?...
Honor the charge they made!..."
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
or
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world...
Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Concord Hymn"
or
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord...
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword...
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free..."
Julia Ward Howe
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
People have always had to fight for their freedom. Evidently many Americans have forgotten our roots...
The western culture's calls for ultimate self-sacrifice that are cited are all calls to join an army and fight other armies in battle. The difference between that and teaching children to value ritual suicide through carnage of civilian population somehow seems vastly different. When a mother who became famous for pulically encouraging her children to blow themselves up in an cat that killed innocent women and chilren becomes a national political figure, it raises serious questions about the viablity of that society to coexist in the family of nations, regardless of the suffereing they may or may have not suffered.
The Artist Formerly Known as PurpleParrot said...
Unfortunately since she was not an Israeli child, her life was worth less for the media
Actually, its because she was killed by Palestinian gunmen shooting bullets into the air that the media chose to ignore her death.
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