Dina Elmuti: I am so tired of having to explain why Palestinians deserve to live

\"Palestinian people live under illegal military occupation and Israel holds the preponderance of military, political and cultural power over the occupied Palestinians. Palestinians have no army, no tanks, no bombers, and no naval ships. And yet, it is the occupied Palestinian people who are constantly asked to guarantee the security and ensure the well-being of their occupiers, while the occupiers are continually held accountable for nothing\", writes Dina a first-generation Palestinian-American living in Chicago, working at an Urban Youth Trauma Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago

What exists today is an almost Kafkaesque reality in which the humanity of the oppressed is posthumously twisted and put on trial over and over and over again. Year after year, they're forced to prove that they are human enough. That they’re alive enough. That their blood and flesh are worth enough, like others. Body count, political leverage and an extensive history of settler brutality exemplify one ugly reality. The media exemplifies another. The Palestinian people live under illegal military occupation and Israel holds the preponderance of military, political and cultural power over the occupied Palestinians. Palestinians have no army, no tanks, no bombers, and no naval ships. And yet, it is the occupied Palestinian people who are constantly asked to guarantee the security and ensure the well-being of their occupiers, while the occupiers are continually held accountable for nothing.

As I sit here watching Israeli forces stop to pose for a selfie before unloading bullets into the bodies of Palestinian youth and severing their lives in incomprehensible ways, I feel so angry, so horrified, so humiliated and burning with indignation, so raw that it’s like a fire raging with decimated hopes. I’m desperately trying to figure out how to be alive in a moment when the indifference of the world to the suffering of my people has never been more unapologetic. I don’t live under Israel’s draconian punishment system and illegal occupation, but I find myself wondering how those in Palestine have suppressed a rage so strong it threatens to tear their being to shreds. I’m crying out the ocean lodged in my throat, but I can’t seem to scream loud enough for the anonymous screams that are silenced by the fetters of bloodcurdling atrocities.

I’m tired of this heart-wrenching feeling of knowing that every time there’s a Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a Ali Dawabsha, a Fadi Aloun, there will be swarms of bigoted Zionist demagogues ready with a premeditated laundry list of justifications why their existences were not even worthy enough to be mourned and that their murderers deserve for their lives to be protected and continue unscathed. Because incinerating and asphyxiating children and robbing them of life are no crimes to them. There will always be mobs of Zionist zealots and supporters who will exert effort and energy if it guarantees demeaning and destroying the lives of Palestinians.

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