IN STEREO

They ask to sit and learn about Al-Walaja – its population and their suffering. There are young women who come like this. As women in the feminist club, they get to know us as personalities. They take hotels; they study Arabic language. They sympathise with us, they smile at us, they laugh with us, and they leave. How many young women I’ve hosted here at home. They do nothing for me. We don’t get any benefit. They come and take ideas about Al-Walaja and our suffering, but as a woman, I hope to benefit somehow from them. For example, I come and tell you about my suffering. You can deliver my word to who? To whom you’ll deliver my suffering? I told you all of my problems. Now, how can you help me? My tongue only gets tired; I talk for nothing.

You don’t benefit me. This is what I see. You do nothing for me. I mean, you come to take the message from us. I don’t know if you use it to profit [or] just to study. You put it in a folder, or just in a book at the library. You end the thing. Our suffering is our suffering. Maybe you don’t believe that we’re a people whose rights and freedoms were violated. I mean, who can believe it? More than sixty years we’ve been occupied. In my mother and father and grandparents’ time, and we also grew up and we’re [still] occupied. I mean, we’ve never enjoyed freedom. This is my voice; let all the world hear it. I’m not embarrassed by this. Every time you sit in a meeting among foreigners, tell them. I’m a Palestinian woman. I’m not afraid of what I say. – Um Ala’a