GUEST BLOG: Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab – I am Palestinian
Previously, if I had said this, I would receive looks of concern, disdain or in the best-case scenario,
“Pakistan?”
“No, Palestine.”
“Where?”
But all that has changed, the response is immediate.
“I am so sorry, what is happening is awful, such a terrible history” or
“I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how to talk about it, it is so awful”.
For the first time in my 50 odd years, I am witnessing the bloody reality behind the founding of Israel in 1948, its apartheid practice, its daily violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians, and its current genocidal actions in Gaza and the West Bank, being laid bare for the world to see and grapple with.
I even watched a Norwegian choir sing our National anthem, the Palestinian national anthem. I did not dare to dream this would be possible, and yet, here we are.
In the bombing of the Greek Orthodox Church, we lost family.
Some were killed in the blast and an older male cousin died because he was not able to receive treatment for heart problems.
We also have family in the besieged Holy Family Catholic Church.
Israeli tanks and snipers stand guard outside preventing anyone from leaving. The Church has now become a living tomb.
Slowly, those still inside including my family are dying. And as you read this, they are still there, limited clothes, food and water and Israeli snipers ready to shoot anyone that tries to leave. It’s been over 80 days of war.
This war against civilians means that my family will probably see their last moments, humiliated, disheveled, as starving terrified hostages.
The anger and hopelessness we feel has become a permanent stain.
How is this allowed to happen? Where is the international law and support from governments like New Zealand? Why are they not fulfilling their international obligations to prevent a genocide as it’s unfolding before our eyes. New Zealand is a signatory to the Genocide Convention, signed in 1948. So why isn’t it joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the international Court of Justice?
As a New Zealand Palestinian I have suffered directly from Israeli apartheid and brutality, of being treated unequally and fearing for my children’s lives. I have been humiliated, strip-searched and abused, had stones thrown at my car and chased while driving in Jerusalem by orthodox Jews and settlers, fearing for my life.
I have visited my mothers stolen home in Katamon in Jerusalem- stolen in the first Nakba of 1948.
I knocked at the door and told the son of the family living there that we would one day return, that this house was still ours and we would always know where it was. Hearing this, the son became violent and abusive. After dismissing her son, I silently stared into the eyes of the Israeli mother now living in my home. We just stared, trying to understand each other as women, trying to find the humanity that connects us. She broke the silence with a few words before I walked away:
“I wondered when you were coming. I have been waiting for this day”.
Even buying food is difficult. Israel decides what food we are allowed to eat and how much. They sell it to us in our homeland at exorbitant prices, and sometimes the food is off or contaminated.
Visiting my family is not simple.
I give my passport to the Israeli officer. She looks at it disinterestedly, flicking through pages with distain.
She looks up and clears her throat. Her voice echoes to those waiting behind me.
“When did you last have sex?”
I hear gasps from foreigners behind me, unused to these attempts of humiliation and abuse.
“Oh, not for a long time” I reply as coolly and calmly as I can.
“How many boyfriends have you had sex with?’
“Three”-I answer undeterred.
She is getting agitated.
She sniffs the air around me and scrunches her nose. “When did you last have your period?” She tries again.
“I can’t remember”.
She beckons to another armed female guard to come over. They speak in Hebrew. Communication is made to an unknown source and I am ordered to follow.
“Go with her” she commands. “Next”.
I am taken to a room with one door and a line of chairs placed against a crème coloured wall.
Opposite is a one- way observation window that I can’t see out of. I am being watched by another who is allowed to restrict my freedom.
The door is slammed shut so I sit and wait. They don’t give me any reason for my being detained.
I am not offered water and I am not allowed the use of the toilet.
It has been a long flight from the other side of the world and I am tired so I stretch out along the line of uncomfortable chairs and try to sleep.
When I am asleep, an officer charges in, bangs the chairs around me to wake me up, and storms out again. The first time, I sit up startled.
But with the second entrance, that defiance and strength that characterizes being
Palestinian awakens, so I remain still with my eyes closed. The banging gets louder and they resorted to throwing chairs in the hope I will be terrified.
I don’t succumb. Finally, after 5 hours, I am roughly pushed out and let go with no exchange of words.
My life has been characterized by Israeli oppression, by denial, by anger and regret.
Regret at all that I cannot experience in my homeland, and the only experience I know is that of an Israeli uniform, a gun, a helmet and a constant threat.
We don’t see Israeli life outside of their brutality and military. We are kept apart. I see the wall, the great illegal monstrosity that separates us from ‘them’. That divides us and reminds us that we are prisoners in our own country and we are not equal.
Katrina is an actress- (last project ‘Poppy’ NZ Film)
Recipient of the Kiwi bank ‘Local Hero’ award (for contributions to the Wellington Community, as part of the ‘New Zealander of the Year Awards’)
Assistant Director Peace Foundation NGO Wellington NZ,
Member of the Blue Lines Project (they came up with the idea of the blue lines on the roads for tsunami warnings in New Zealand) which won The International Association for Emergency Managers award both its Global and Oceana Public Awareness categories in 2012,
She was a part of the Wellington City Council Tsunami awareness program,
Wellington City Council ‘Summer City’ Children’s Events Coordinator
Island Bay Festival Managing Director
Wellington City Council Seniors’ Neighbourhood Resilience coordinator,
Neighbourhood support coordinator for Island Bay. Wellington City Council, Spring Festival Children’s coordinator.
We live in a corrupted world, led by the West with the USA sitting atop of this corruption. This is why genocide is allowed to happen. This is why NZ turns a blind eye to this travesty, as do all other Western nations, as does most of the world – none of them wishing to attract the ire of the country sitting atop of this rotten world we all live in. The system, otherwise known as politics, is broken, with the country leading this system, the USA being the most broken – bought and paid for by moneyed interests – country of all. Israel is the USA’s nearest and dearest buddy, hence why genocide is allowed to take place with little, if any international push back. No one wants to take on the USA, let alone their best bud. This is power, corrupted power, and given that this power is able to get away with mass slaughter, god only knows what this power (and all the varied money-bagged interests corrupting US politics) may do to anyone of us.
The tragedy in Gaza-Palestine should be a seminal event because it starkly highlights the broken world/political system we are all living under. And if we, the people, cannot stop this tragedy from reaching its ultimate goal…then the same rotten drivers pushing this massacre, can, and will, have their way with anyone of us – anywhere – in the not too distant future.
Stand up and fight, for Palestine, for us all…..
No, not for us all. Most of us don’t want a bar of the corrupt, fanatical extremism that is so rife amongst the Arab Palestinians. Not even the neighboring Arab nations want them. Perhaps it’s time the Arab Palestinians took some Agency, some ownership, for causing much of the chaos in the middle east. They have refused every offer of an independent state – each offer including far more land than was actually owned by Arabs in 1948 – instead preferring to fight and kill, inevitably losing their war, and losing further ground. See, the rest of the world is starting to wake up to the lies and propaganda. The only children deliberately killed in the current crisis were murdered by gazans.
Corrupt, fanatical extremists, creating chaos all through their lands. Well, there must be a reason or reasons for this. It could be because this is all just the way they are. We cannot discount this reason because this type of behavior is inherent within all of us with conditioning usually determining this type, if not most types of behavior. So, what are the conditions here. Well, the Middle East has abundant natural resources. And the world is run/controlled by, let me put this simply, the West. We Westerners have a history of taking/controlling what we want. Its what we do. Unfortunately for Middle Easterners, we doing as we please in their neck of the woods tends to upset the locals, turning some into fanatical extremists, even, depending on how we treat them. Ole Donny-boy still has the US controlling Syrian oil for example, not that the world knows or cares because, well, when one controls the world one also needs a widespread media apparatus that can manage any given situation in favour of the controllers. Talk about power! I wonder what other chaos has been attributed to the locals rather than to our money-hungry, meddling ways. We all know that ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda are all our creations – and – still largely propped up by us. Hamas was largely funded by Israel, many say created by Israel, even, as a means of dividing the Palestinian people, thus undermining the true Palestinian power-block of that time, the PLO.
As for Palestine refusing invitations of independence – the devil is in the details. We controlled this circumstance and what was being offered. No wonder they refused, most peoples would.
So, to end. Yes, there’s corruption, extremism, fanaticism, chaos, on show here, but unfortunately for the people of Palestine, they are the one’s taking the brunt of these actions, and again, I need to warn people, this can all be turned on anyone of us in the not too distant future. We need to be more aware……
You seem to forget who started this conflict and actually every conflict.
If Hamas surrender then its all over and the people of Gaza can got back to living on Israeli welfare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooMCvGlbbc4&t=3s
History does not change just because you are too stubborn to understand it.
I recently saw a comedian, can’t remember his name, but he asked his audience who they supported and one supported Israel. To that, he responds that the audience member had only started watching from this season…
This should be read by all commentors on this blog, but alas it wont change the minds of the Zionist-lovers here. They belive that Palestinans are subhuman and that is all there is to it.
Thank you for your story Katrina. I am so sorry about you and your family’s dreadful, cruel experiences at the hands of the Israelis.
From what Katrina says it’s obvious history is repeating itself. Only this time, the once oppressed have become the oppressors with a vengeance, coming very close to doing exactly what was done to Jews, Romanies, Slavs et al in Europe not so long ago! But now, unlike in the past, the rest of the world does absolutely nothing to help the oppressed, in this case Palestinians, for fear of upsetting international Jewry!
How gutless and inhumane world governments have become, when it all comes down to not wanting to offend those who control international money flow, virtually allowing ethnic cleansing and genocide to be committed! Appalling and sickening!
Well said,
What astonishes and confuses me is.
That Israel was created as an apology by the western world for the appalling treatment of the Jewish people’s by Germany, and other nations in close proximity.
Great, good idea, everybody went off patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
Then we see this utter cruel genocide inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israelis.
Could someone please explain how Israels behaviour is any better than Germanys. Especially given their experience in the hands of Germany
Images of the Warsaw ghetto come to mind.
Thanks for this confronting & honest description of your experiences. While this site is usually not in favor of the believe all women mantra, hopefully, most readers will take account of your circumstances before making any decisions. Since the late 60s we have been told that Arabs are bad & Jews are good & it is a major failure of Western media that it has taken this horrific destruction by Israel to to finally start making people understand the evil that exists in Israel.
Katrina, you escaped the Israeli yoke to find refuge among another colonized people on the other side of the world. You will now know, if you did not before, that the New Zealand state, as distinct from the people over whom it rules, blindly supports the United States, the United Kingdom and the State of Israel in their genocidal attacks against the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank. Regardless of whether you now consider yourself tangata motu of Aotearoa, or still choose to identify as Palestinian, you have to face the fact that the New Zealand state, the Realm of New Zealand, is an enemy to both our peoples.
South Africa is a different case. For pragmatic reasons the State of Israel strongly supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the new multi-racial government in Pretoria has not forgotten that the State of Israel backed the apartheid regime. Nor has it forgotten that the Palestinians supported the black liberation movement in South Africa.
New Zealand, however, remains a colonialist state which is deeply complicit in the war crimes of its Five Eyes partners and the State of Israel. There is no way that it will join South Africa in bringing the Gaza genocide to book and it would be naive to expect any change in the New Zealand position until the colonialist regime is overthrown. That should be a priority for Palestinians as it is for tangata motu.