Damp minutes. July 22nd, 2014.

Today was overflowing with damp minutes, a morning siren that has become almost routine but still rings eery, conversations that do not and cannot cease to rip and weigh and that left me dizzy and tearful and curled like fingers around a thumb, the crazy of the internet outdone only by the crazy of what it tells and what I imagine happening some tens of miles south of my home, suffering crawling like a sprinkle of dust up the coast, through invisible currents, on the breeze, dispersing. Is this a story? It has to be a story. Today was my July 22nd, 2014 in the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the place that I still choose to believe has room in its cracking coasts and hollowed hills to allow itself to be described as Israel-Palestine.

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As I finished writing this, the bus I was on from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv pulled to stop, in the middle of the highway. The cars around us had almost all stopped as well. Some people are crouching on the side of the road as the siren bookends this morning. Then the bus started moving again.

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1

Laura on July 23, 2014 at 11:06

Yes Moriel, courage to you. These are extremely heavy times but we need people like you to keep the light shining and to be a continual call to reason and compassion. Some words from Gideon Levy (taken from the recent article in the Independent) which I hope will give you strength:

“I am very pessimistic, sure… But having said this, I must say, if we had been sitting here in the late 1980s and you had told me that the Berlin wall will fall within months, that the Soviet Union will fall within months, that parts of the regime in South Africa will fall within months, I would have laughed at you. Perhaps the only hope I have is that this occupation regime hopefully is already so rotten that maybe it will fall by itself one day. You have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles.”
2

ATB on July 23, 2014 at 03:37

These are heavy times for all of us here, and I feel that voices of dissent are muffled and marginalized more than usual. And then other voices are muffled and silenced forever because they are the wrong type of different. Keep up the good work and the protest. You aren’t alone. With love from Jerusalem.