Dr. Mona El-Farra: “… I cannot absorb or understand or get on with what happened to us during the 51 days. It was beyond words. It was not just war crimes — there was a systematic way of genocide. They were trying to get rid of us all. And of course I’m glad and relieved of the ceasefire, because if it didn’t start, there would have been more destruction than what we saw in Gaza. So I’m relieved it happened.”
Yafa Jarrar: “Being in solidarity includes being a part of their campaigns, being in continuous communication with them, because this is what makes us stronger. One of the things that unites us — as Palestinians and as indigenous people here on Turtle Island — is that we’re both subject to colonial projects. Now, these colonial projects differ, but they have a lot of striking similarities that we see. History repeats itself. Greed repeats itself and manifests itself in different ways. And we see a lot of similarities in terms of the actual apartheid policies that exist, let’s say, in Palestine by the Israeli apartheid regime and the policies that the indigenous people have been subject to here on Turtle Island and particularly here in Canada. Residential schools, different forms of projects that led slowly to what is called or used as ethnic cleansing of certain people. Legal separation. We see it here with the reserve system. Residential schools — people still suffer from it today. And the same in Palestine – we see these kinds of legal separations and slow genocide, and ethnic cleansing. In many ways it’s slow, but we’ve seen it happening quicker with the situation in Gaza recently.”
Continue reading at http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/dr-mona-el-farra-mass-trauma-and-destruction-gaza