Who are the real prisoners?, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
When I asked in my previous article, “Until when this conspiracy of silence?” concerning more than 11,000 Palestinian prisoners kidnapped from their homes by Israeli intelligence officers, and suffering the cruelest torture at the hands of sadist jailers in Israeli prisons, I wanted to say that Western silence regarding this brutality was only because the victims are Arabs. But the responses of some Arab bloggers to my article reminded me of a more dangerous silence, the silence of Arab people. It is more dangerous because it indicates a collapse of thought and identity. When a Palestinian youth sacrifices his life to prevent the demolition of a house in the Salwan neighborhood in Jerusalem, and when an unarmed Palestinian girl faces the Israeli military oppression machine on her own, they do so because both of them believe in their land, their nation and their duty toward both, not only toward their families and villages, but also toward Palestine.