On July 7, 2014 Eric Garner was murdered by suffocation by a white policeman in Brooklyn, N.Y. As the officer held Mr. Garner on the pavement in an illegal chokehold, Garner repeated eleven times, “I can’t breathe.” Then he stopped breathing.
As mostly black neighborhoods protested this killing, they repeated Eric’s last words as evidence that black U.S. citizens are systematically choked to death every day by a racism that denies their right to exist.
In the West Bank of Palestine the feeling is the same. Israeli settlements are growing. They start as small hilltop encampments on stolen Palestinian land and grow into well-appointed towns and cities. As they grow, one feels them sliding down the hillsides like a lava flow or creeping like an invasive plant over the land towards the roads Palestinians drive on and into the olive groves they are trying to hold onto. One feels the settlers’ suffocating presence even before they take over a village’s fresh water spring and cut down the surrounding olive trees.
They are not benign. The settlers’ ambition is to take all the land in sight and to chase the Palestinians away. And they are armed. They are a leaderless army, not accountable to anyone.
One feels Israel is cutting off the oxygen to Palestine, not everywhere at once, but slowly, inexorably and purposefully. With less oxygen in the air, one has less ability to deal with the newly fortified checkpoints, the accelerated rate of home demolitions, the loss of grazing land for animals, the less and less water being allowed into homes, wells, and irrigation systems.
All of Palestine is crying, “I can’t breathe.” How many times before it is too late?
