After 65 years of suffering, the home land I know as Palestine has struggled to stand on its two feet for fear of being knocked back down by evil step-father we know as Israel. Ever since October of the year 2000, there have been 6000 Palestinian casualties. We have done nothing but lived our lives and we get treated like animals, although I believe the animals get treated better. This is a joke to believe a country, like the United States, can sit back and watch us, the Palestinians, be segregated, and looked down upon after all the civil rights movements that the USA has been through. This is not a topic to be dealt with lightly, there are people being killed overseas, not once has the United States dared spare us a cent in funds. I’ve been to Palestine twice now, once in my childhood and once recently a few summers ago.

It was a bright day when my grandmother decided to take me and my sisters to the holy land of Jerusalem for a week or so. It was on that trip, at that security checkpoint, when I realized what Israel has actually been doing. They stopped our car and told us to step out of our car, they reinforced there power with the assault rifles that hung across their chests. They searched our bags, threw them around a bit and then told us, “we were good” and that we could go into the city. It wasn’t the fact that they pushed me out of my car or the fact that they had guns; I wasn’t even fazed that they did not clean up the mess they made of our luggage. What I was upset about was that I was not able to have free passage to the one of the most religious places in my country. My country is not entrusted with the rights of an airport, nor funded well enough to function as well as it could, not even rights of free passage into and out of Israel are given to us. We are being watched, at all times. Yet, through all the suffering, the last thing we can do is fight fire with fire. The only way to put out a raging fire is pour some relaxing water over it. Non-violent civil disobedience is the water that can put out the flames of injustice that have now been raging for 65 years. If we lose control or patience, the country of Israel, being the fiendish devil it is, will find its way to place the blame on us, and that will only cause further enragement to ensue.

This isn’t about power, nor does it have anything to do about money, the true goal is to summon the unalienable rights that have been long buried and long denied from my Palestinian brothers and sisters alike. This is no different than women wanting rights, or black people wanting rights, or any reforming movement that has ever happened, we just want our rights back. Besides, the United States is not going to solve its debt problems if it is donating 8.5 million dollars a day to Israel, the equivalence of 2.9 trillion a year. That’s 2.9 million for food, for programs to help unemployment, to help pay off the substantial debt the US already has, it will only get worse with time at this rate. Why not set-up a protest against taxes that are assisting Israelis, do what’s best for the country you live in, but also for the country that I wish to call home. Not only am I a supporter of the Palestinian Independence movement but so is the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

The PLO is the closest thing we Palestinians, in today’s era, have for a government and although it is helpful, it is not as successful as it can be. Donations to this organization can be given to help support the national funds that Palestine can have at its disposal, via subsidiary organizations that the PLO connects to. It is a may be a tough time being American, but there is always someone out there who is struggling more than you are, think about the needy, the things that you take for granite that others cherish. We want what you take for granite, we want independence.