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Why we care for the Palestinians
By Imthiaz Bakeer Markar
"It's a little girl. She's running eastward." Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?" 'A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death.' I think that one of the positions took her out' 'I am going to confirm the kill. 'We fired and killed her..I confirmed the kill. Over."

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. (16/11/05), The Guardian, London )

Palestine still continues to be a scar on the conscience of humanity.
The young Palestinian boy Ahmed, still sees his grandfather holding on to the key of their family home from which they were forced out in 1948 (now, Jewish immigrants live there calling themselves citizens of Israel).

His parents have lived all their lives in a miserable and overcrowded refugee camp often struggling to make ends meet. Their home and, indeed, their neighbourhood, were bulldozed by the Israeli military during a "routine security exercise" recently, while just a few hundred metres away illegal Jewish settlers live in the most fertile land in their village. His father who had for years been toiling in their olive garden (their livelihood), has also seen all of the trees being uprooted by the occupying army; it's of course, according to the occupiers, "a defensive measure to prevent attacks to (illegal) Jewish settlements".

Ahmed and his sister get aggressively searched by occupying soldiers when going to school, but often the school is closed when the occupation declares curfews, effectively imprisoning whole towns and villages.

The little boy is not allowed to dream, to dream of being a doctor or an engineer that we wish for our children. However, like his grandfather who still stubbornly holds on to that rusty old key, his parents, who have refused to bow down to a lifetime of oppression and injustice, or his sister who still bravely walks in the same road to school where her friend got shot; Ahmed, is defiant and determined as ever to one day taste the fruits of freedom along with millions of other Palestinians.

It is towards this remarkable human spirit, lived every day for the past half a century by the Palestinians that we proudly express our solidarity today.
November 29th is the UN's International Day for solidarity with Palestine.
(The writer is the co-chairperson of the Sri Lanka-Palestine Solidarity Committee.)

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