Operazione Colomba English

PALESTINE It happens
It happens, not infrequently, that one feels a deep rage at the injustice taking place.
Pouring cement into water wells, stealing Palestinian livestock, uprooting olive trees.
Preventing Palestinians from working their own land,
setting up armed flying checkpoints at the entrances to villages,
grazing sheep on Palestinian land and destroying their olive trees.
Shining enormous floodlights all night long onto Palestinian homes, planting Israeli flags on the hills, passing through villages to spread terror.
Entering homes, demolishing them.
Detaining, arresting, blindfolds and handcuffs.
Beating, killing.

The occupation permeates everything, the occupation reaches everywhere.
The occupation is capillary, daily, systemic and systematic.
The occupation is strategic, paranoid.
Piece by piece, it seeks to steal all the land from the Palestinians.
A constant and continuous, violent and deliberate oppression.
A sensory, physical, mental oppression.
To live under occupation is to live knowing that at any moment, anything can happen.
The occupation makes the rules. Unjust, inequitable rules.
Rules of discrimination and apartheid.
Rules of ethnic cleansing, of settler colonialism and territorial expropriation.
The occupation marks time, between waiting and keeping watch.
Space is life, and the occupation wants to suffocate it.
The occupation dictates everything, at every level.
The occupation wants to take your breath away.
It was a football match on the school's small pitch.
It was life, it was air. It became occupation.
It became the constant in which Palestinians are immersed, as they try to live a life of dignity.
Everyone is caught up in it, children included, who far too soon learn the meaning of an oppressed existence.
But what game are we playing?
One in which the pawns are people, the goal is their land, and the playing field is their lives.
What game are we playing?
While everything goes on, between glimpses of normality.
The Israelis have created this system, the Palestinians know it, suffer it, must live with it.
I, an international activist, have breaks from the field, I will leave.
I am a simple instrument in the hands of Palestinian resistance.
The occupation, on the other hand, is their life, without a break.
And I ask myself what drives the settlers to live a wretched existence, just to make Palestinian life unliveable.
Some in containers, in outposts, others in colonies perched on hilltops and surrounded by walls and barbed wire.
Obsessed, frightened.
Oppressors of the Palestinians and of themselves.
On Saturday, the day of rest, the occupation expands and strikes hard.
How can one do this to another person? If one considers them a person...
And sometimes I wonder how Palestinians manage to resist. I probably cannot understand.
Immersed in an inhuman, unjust, dangerous reality.
In constant watch, recognising every car.
Look at the colour of the licence plate, listen for whether the dogs are barking. Everything takes on a different meaning. A reality that Palestinians know how to make full of life, of humanity, of sharing. Of that visceral Sumud, of those who remain on their own land, resist the occupation, and inhabit their own lives.

Read the full diary on the website
https://www.operazionecolomba.it/en/palestine/395-it-happens.html

COLOMBIA On May 16, Operazione Colomba accompanied the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó to the event "Handover and Commencement of the Memorialization Process of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó," organized by the Colombian Ministry of Culture in the village of La Resbalosa.

“Impunity does not erase history: it makes it stronger.”

These words set the tone for the inauguration of the memorial monuments—the House-Museum and the Dome of Memory—commemorating the La Resbalosa massacre of February 21, 2005.

“A better world can be built,” was the message directed to the entire world by Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo, who has accompanied the Peace Community since its inception. “After so much slander, these two monuments have finally been realized as a result of the state acknowledging its responsibility in the massacre. Through the Ministry of Culture, this establishes a permanent memorial. Today, we anchor this memory for the future, including for those who did not live through or witness this suffering, because this pain belongs to all of humanity. This is not just about remembering death, but about remembering life, so that this may never happen again.”

Inside the House-Museum hangs a painting depicting Natalia (5 years old) and Santiago (18 months old) just moments before they were massacred. The artwork—an acrylic painting on canvas—was donated free of charge by Erica Tenca, an Operazione Colomba volunteer. At the invitation of the Peace Community itself, she beautifully captured the final moments of the two young children's lives.