Ana Sánchez // Mohammed Khatib and another British activists were arrested Friday 13th February in a nonviolent demonstration in the Palestinian village of Bilin. I am quite sure your first reaction after reading this would be…and so what? This is something normal, isn’t it?
I believe is important to differentiate here between what´s normal and what we are used to. Yes, we are used to reading, hearing and watching Palestinians getting arrested, but is this really a normal thing?
My mom used to tell us a story when we were kids, the story of the frog and the boiling water. A couple of science students decided to put a frog in boiling water and see what it will do. They boiled the water and when it was almost ready, they tried to put the frog in it. As soon as the frog felt the heat, jumped away and hided somewhere else probably thinking that the two barbaric students were trying to kill her. The students decided to try again, (with another frog, the previous one was already too traumatized) but this time, they put the frog into the pot while the water was still cold, letting it warm up slowly. The frog did notice the warm water, but she felt it was nice… so it relaxed and enjoyed the warm bath. Few minutes after, the heat was too suffocating. It tried to scream and jumped away, but the frog could do nothing about it and finally died boiled in the same nice and warm bath….the frog got used to it and it did not noticed that it was being slowly killed.
And this is exactly what Israel does every day to Palestinians since 1948. It is slowly killing them. Is killing their hopes, their freedom, is killing them literally, bombing Gaza, seizing the West Bank, denying permits and demolishing houses. And many of us wonder why; why no one is doing anything? All these UN, EU, ICC and many other list of acronyms and sexy names of NGOs and others…why no one is doing anything? Let me tell you why: we are all frogs. We are frogs that got used to extrajudicial killings, checkpoints, walls and permits. Furthermore, we got so much used to the occupation that we cannot even tell when it turned into apartheid, and we say it quietly, with fear of being tagged as radicals or extremists.
They built the Wall and people moved, screamed and fought. Today, 10 years later, Palestinian women need to take into consideration that if they are about to give birth, the checkpoint might be closed, the permit might be not valid, or the soldier might just not let her through….and we keep looking away trying to convince ourselves that this is normal…how sad, isn’t it? How sad is to be a dying frog in your own boiling water…
This is not the first time that Mohammed Khatib was beaten and arrested for exercising his legitimate right to protest. For demanding his basic rights, as a human, as a Palestinian, and neither the Palestinian Authority, neither the International community and even less Israel, are doing anything to guarantee them. He is defending his rights with the determination that gives you the truth. Mohammed Khatib and many others are defending their right to live with dignity, their right to be free and their right to live in peace and for doing so, they are being injured, jailed or even killed. And all this is happening, again, because we are all frogs. We are getting used to the illegal transfer of prisoners from the occupied to the occupier territory, getting used to torture and ill treatment, to kangaroo courts with no legal guarantees, getting used to the daily violence, to the warm water pot which will eventually kill us and explode.
We cannot get used to. We cannot normalize violence. We cannot tolerated continuous and systematic human rights abuses just because they seem normal to us…we just cannot be dying frogs.
