So today is the third day of Eid Al Fitr that all Muslims worldwide celebrate right after the culmination of the month of Ramadan. Not sure if it’s only me, but Ramadan seems to have lost its glory. Years ago when I was a child, people’s attitudes towards both Ramadan and Eid (festival) were way different than now. Maybe I have grown up to the extent that I see in them nothing but the mere fact that few arrogant relatives come for a visit for a couple of minutes, and everyone just sucks them up.

It has been a gloomy day in deed. Being self-centered often times, I thought that my own family never enjoyed the Ramadan that other people celebrate. But the night prior to the Eid, I went for a drive to Ramallah with my uncle and three sisters, we toured around Al Manara and the mall a bit, and felt the legendary atmosphere. People were happy. That hit me; I am not accustomed to seeing them vividly preoccupied with the preparation for the big “day.”

So I came back home and wrote to all my contacts wishing them a Happy Eid and expressed my astonishment and satisfaction to see promising smiles in the crowded streets of Ramallah. But the sad part was that I knew it was merely fleeting moments and that those smiles would be wiped off soon. Not only have my fears become true, but I was blind. Yes, blind. Or may be I just chose not to see it. May be I wanted to believe that we are actually happy.

Would I miss Ramadan? NO. Not really. It has been made hell this year.

While Ramadan is believed to be the holy month during which people get closer to Allah by fasting from food and drink all day long and focus on their faith instead, I am not pretty sure this was the case with us Palestinians. It was only a drug. Ramadan numbed our pain. We could handle both the Israeli and Palestinian political, economic, and security pressure knowing that the day of salvation was approaching; the Eid. But after the three days elapsed, then what?

Now thousands of Palestinians are waiting for the next phase. It has been seven months now. Seven months, and thousands of the PA employees have not received their salaries. And two months elapsed with millions of students deprived form their right of education. I have three sisters and two brothers who do nothing but stay at home. They have not attended school from the very beginning of this term. It is both sad and frustrating that they have to “do the time” and pay a high price.

Reading the news headlines on the first days of Eid is not healthy at all. It lessens the effect of the drug, and one starts to get sober. Sounds funny in deed, but that was the case.

Few minutes ago, I surfed some of the blogs and came across few Iraqi bloggers writing on both Ramadan and Eid. If the titles did not mention “in Iraq,” I swear I could never tell the difference between Iraq and Palestine. The hunger, misery, constant killing, and lack of security are all Palestinian symptoms.

I am speechless now; I can hardly verbalize the so many conflicting thoughts. Heaven knows how things would be like next Ramadan, but I would not speculate it already. It is not time to worry about it now, other issues are on stake; food, money, and education. Until then, there are a lot of things to sort out.

Yesterday, I realized that I believe in love at first sight. Not the romantic kind, rather the sense of connecting with another human being without ever having to say a word. Indeed, the person I was so enthralled with last night was a five-month-old girl, who smiled at me and then hid her face in shyness. Those few moments of interacting with this baby lifted my spirits, but it also made me reflect in sadness about the fact that many children in this current conflict are robbed of their joy and their childhood.

I often contemplate how mature Palestinian children seem. Sure, they play the childhood games that we all played in our day, but there is wisdom in their words that is eerily sobering. Their age defines them as children, but if you have a conversation with a Palestinian child, you will realize how much awareness she has of the world around her, of suffering in the next village, in Gaza, in Lebanon. She is a child that has empathy and understands that life, by nature, is wrought with all sorts of difficulties.

A Palestinian child knows better; life is not as it is depicted in cartoons, where those who die are miraculously resurrected not once, but several times, where injuries are healed instantaneously, where death is a joke and life is a series of slapstick moments. A Palestinian child escapes into imagination, but she is never far removed from the reality of children and adults alike being indiscriminately shot outside her window, in her classroom, at the local bakery.

Who would have thought that normal things, simply walking down the street to grab a falafel sandwich, could result in your untimely death? Perhaps the Israeli army mistook the falafel stand for a bomb-making factory, or an ammunition shop? Make no mistake about it; the Israeli military have made too many “mistakes” that there is obviously a pattern there, wouldn’t you think?

A child that is robbed of the sense of security, therefore, is a child that is mature beyond her years. She knows that the bullets and the tank shells do not discriminate. Her father can shield her from the neighbor’s vicious dog, from the crazy drivers, he will hold her hand to cross the street, but he will not be able to capture a bullet in his hand like the mythological superheroes in blockbuster movies out this summer in theatres near you. He might be able to take the bullet for her though. But once gone, who will be her protective shield against the harsh reality of life that goes on in what seems the periphery of the conflict? And who will be there to share some of her joyous milestones; graduation, marriage, the birth of a child? Hers is a joy that is always overshadowed by a greater sorrow.

Is it fair that 31 Palestinian children have died in a 31-day period? A child-a-day; is that the new Israeli army mantra? Khaled was just a one-year-old, Aya was seven, Sabreen was only three. What lost potential, what lost promise – who knows what Khaled would have grown up to be? An astronaut? A veterinarian? A philosopher? What about Aya; she could have become a fashion designer, a teacher, a mother. By what right has this promise been so violently plucked and trampled upon cruelly and without a moment’s hesitation on the part of the Israeli soldier, who heartlessly unleashed a fiery rain of bullets and shells on a neighborhood as if he is in a simulated video game and those who die are fictitious and unreal? Perhaps that is what he is made to believe, otherwise, who in clear consciousness is so willing to pull the trigger and with one spray of bullets destroy life, potential and rob joy?

If you can see the smiling face of your own child, then how do you go out and unquestioningly take the life of others? If you value life, then how do you live with the burden of knowing that you have taken it so unjustifiably? Perhaps that is your perpetual punishment; the judgment of a child scorned is the harshest of them all.

It greatly bothers me that I am unable to be a good friend to her; I could not offer my condolences to her in person when her brother died suddenly from a heart attack last summer or the fact that when her husband was ill, I was not able to stand by her side.

Thank God for modern communication; although in this sweltering “Summer Rain” operation, it took about two weeks to get through to her to find out about her well being and that of her family. When I called she was sitting in her office, with no electricity because the owner of their office building decided not to turn on the generator that day in order to curb the costs of rising fuel.

How were they conducting business, I asked, to which she replied that they had to revert to primitive means of communication and were having to do everything over the phone, since they could not reply to emails or receive faxes. It is ironic that this could happen in the day and age of globalization and mass communication, which proves that what we take for granted is ever so fragile.

I asked my friend about the family and how they were holding up given the current situation in Gaza. She said that the family of nine that had been killed a few nights earlier was very close to where they lived. In the densely populated Gaza, there is nowhere to hide and take refuge when an air strike occurs. Those who claim that Palestinian armed groups use innocent civilians as human shields are gravely mistaken; they cannot escape into the wilderness and hide in caves away from population centers, simply because such is the stronghold Israel has on movement and space that these men live and almost certainly die among the innocent.

My friend’s kids were really excited about watching the final World Cup games, but the Israelis scrambled satellite signals and they were unable to enjoy the game. She told me how they were constantly fighting with one another over who uses the internet within the limited time slot that their electricity generator allows. The radio has become a major source of entertainment after the Internet and TV were scrapped; but, when the batteries ran out they could not be replaced – no batteries were to be found in Gaza. What are children and teenagers to do under such circumstance but drive their mother mad, who stands by heartbroken at their stolen childhood?

Grandparents are important in all children’s lives, they connect our parents’ past to our present, and the fact that my friend cannot take her children to visit her parents is saddening. To visit her parents, my friend used to take the beach route mostly as an alternative since the main roads were closed off by Israel. This route, however, has become one of the most dangerous and most avoided during the past month or so. Palestinians scarcely use this route anymore because anyone who uses it takes the risk of being shelled from the sea, like Huda’s family, who were killed enjoying a family outing on a hot summer day over a month ago. Who would have thought that the perils of the sea could reach out and snatch you from what turned out to be the false safety of the shore?

Now, as the front in the north has opened with Israel, i.e. Lebanon, the issue of Gaza and the Palestinians has all but dropped from the radar. Yet there are countless families in Gaza, who still endure siege and its ramifications; bombardment and the chronic state of trauma and anxiety that result from it. The violence of the occupation is not just the gruesomeness of the killing and the blood images that flash repeatedly across TV screens; the violence of the occupation has a more sinister effect on the lives of people who have to go through constant attack with no means of escape to a safer haven and indeed absolutely no glimmer of hope for improvement in their situation or it ever shaping into something that remotely resembles a normal, peaceful and secure existence. Those images can never be quantified, for the real wounds are deeply carved rivers of unquenchable anguish in the heart of every Palestinian.