The sun’s rays are burning in Palestine.
My name is Shams [Sunshine]. I am 56 years old. I work as the director of an integrated kindergarten with disabled children. I work in my community serving women and the elderly.
I am a person in a country where all laws and all rights are burning.
My mother died while keeping the key to our beautiful house and our green garden, which she left in her town in 1948. The little girl (Sheikh Mones), was expelled from there 75 years ago, from that beautiful town that was built on Tel al-Rabi’ and which the occupier now calls Tel Aviv.
Neither the elderly nor the young forget. Even if our elders die, it is a history whose memory we recall as with every setback of a tiger.
My mother died 3 years ago and did not lose hope for a moment of returning to her beautiful town, and she kept the key as if it were an inheritance, and instructed me not to lose it in the hope of returning.
Our story with the occupier is the story of a strong person controlling a weak person, imprisoning him, controlling his movements, thoughts, and work, depriving him of any dream, and destroying all his projects and livelihoods. Our dream has become to live and for our children to grow up. In our country, we look at our children and do not imagine images of youth in their faces because we are pursued everywhere and death is a spectre that haunts us all the time.
I do not know who sold our country and who received the price. The victims are a good people, a people who love life, love education, love construction, and love development, but every moment we are exposed to setbacks that take us back to zero.
We have been subjected to many setbacks since 1948 and 1967, and wars have continued against us for many years. Each time we lose lives. Our women, youth and children are imprisoned. We are besieged, starved, poor, and have primitive services; and we are still fighting to recover our stolen rights, our lands, and our homes.
Then the Gaza war came to announce to the whole world that we will not surrender, we will not forget, and that we are steadfast and patient until we regain what is lost, what was stolen from us. We will survive despite the injustice of the world, and the conspiracy and alliances against us from countries that claim to support human rights and democracy.
We will survive because we are a steadfast people and an unbreakable people, and because the owner of justice and right is strong and we are the owners of justice and right.
Our homeland, Palestine and Gaza, is a beautiful part of this beautiful country that has been stolen and international conspiracies will continue to struggle until we regain our rights.
We know that the world is unjust and no one lives with our suffering. We have lost many friends, families, and children whom we loved and knew well, and we know the extent of their belief in their cause and the magnitude of their sacrifices, because our hope in God is great.
We will not forget that river that my father used to tell me about every day, which was the fish river that was close to our town and city, Jaffa, the Al-Jarishah River, where my father used to catch fresh fish daily.
Whereas now we have been eating frozen fish for 75 years.
We will not forget that beautiful sea where they stayed up every night, on its shores, chatting and dancing.
And now we do not know the sea except through pictures.
If we travel outside Palestine, we cannot do so except through complicated procedures, and we must grow to the age of 60 in order to have means for reaching the sea.
The whole world is just watching as if it were a movie, but they do not feel the extent of our suffering from the occupier. We know that it is difficult for you to save us. We have grown very old while we are waiting, and our parents have died.
And there is still a child who suffers and is sad and will not surrender. His dream of a homeland remains.
But our case has become yours. Your human rights institutions have not and will not be of any use to us. As long as you are just spectators…our children, our women, our elders, our youth, they are all just stories. But they deserve to be beautiful stories that have an ending that pleases the spectator.
