settlements

I first saw these cards at a Palestine activism conference around 2002, when they were still quite new, being distributed by the Ann Arbor Friends Meeting’s Palestine Israel Action Group (PIAG). With the front side featuring a set of maps depicting Palestinian loss of land from pre-Nakba times to present, and the back featuring a contemporary map showing the fragmentation of the West Bank (alongside various statistics and quotes), these cards are simple, convenient, and effective tools which remain popular a decade after their introduction.

I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as an Israeli Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

If you’re beaten up, harassed, or verbally attacked for no reason, know that you’re in an area under Israeli colonial control. Indeed, one must find this irrational. Physics suggest that “to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.” This could apply to most life cases too. When you’re in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Israel, however, you obviously “provoke” a reaction by simply being Palestinian.

“It’s just because I’m Palestinian” shouts a young woman toward the Israeli soldiers dragging her from a bus that serves Israel’s settler population and travels its segregated roads.

Video shot by Anne Paq with the ActiveStills collective shows activists boarding the bus and Israeli forces asking them in broken Arabic for their travel permits. The soldiers then drag the activists from their seats.