00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the year-ender issue titled "We Bear Witness".
00:06 The issue is dedicated to the people of Gaza and what they went through.
00:10 Book excerpt from "On Palestine" by Edward Said, published by Left Word in 2014.
00:17 Stubborn survival. Musings on the Palestinian struggle to be heard.
00:23 There is no Palestinian army of occupation. No Palestinian tanks. No soldiers.
00:29 No helicopter gunships. No artillery. No government to speak of.
00:34 But there are the terrorists and the violence that Israel has invented so that its own neurosis
00:41 can be inscribed on the bodies of Palestinians without effective protest from the overwhelming
00:47 majority of Israel's laggard philosophers, intellectuals, artists, peace activists.
00:54 Palestinian schools, libraries and universities have ceased normal functioning for months now.
01:01 And we still wait for the Western freedom to write groups and the vociferous defenders
01:06 of academic freedom in America to raise their voices in protest.
01:11 I have yet to see one academic organization, either in Israel or in the West, make a declaration
01:18 about this profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning,
01:23 to attend school. In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security,
01:32 which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli insecurity.
01:39 The whole world must sympathize while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women,
01:45 bereaved communities and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded.
01:52 Doubtless, we will be told these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic cruelty.
01:59 After all, the two sides are engaged in a cycle of violence which has to be stopped sometime,
02:07 somewhere. Once in a while, we ought to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side
02:14 with an army and a country. The other is a stateless, dispossessed population without
02:21 rights or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life
02:28 has either been hijacked or it has been so perverted, in my opinion, to be useless except
02:35 as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture,
02:42 slowly, fastidiously, inexorably. This is the truth of what Palestinians suffer,
02:49 but in any case, Israeli policy will ultimately fail.
02:54 It may seem quixotic for me to say, even if the immediate prospects are grim,
02:59 from a Palestinian perspective, they are not all dark. The Palestinians stubbornly survive
03:05 and Palestinian society, devastated, nearly ruined, desolate, in so many ways, is like
03:13 Hardy's thrush in its blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing
03:20 gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly, and none is fuller of civic
03:28 and social initiatives and functioning institutions, including a miraculously vital
03:35 music conservatory. Even though they are mostly unorganized and in some cases lead miserable
03:41 lives of exile and statelessness, diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged
03:48 by the problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I know is always trying somehow
03:55 to advance the cause. For this and more, read the year-ender issue of Outlook.
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