They did it to Native Americans, to Palestinians like my family in 1948, and now Trump wants to do it again in Gaza. It's called 'forcible transfer,' and it kills something much greater than any individual life.
This video helped me so much to understand the “passion” the Palestinians have for the “land”.
It’s not about ownership as it is with Western concepts of land ownership, but it’s about connection, life, interchange with the life force that land gives, how the relationship with the land imbued and saturated itself into their actual living.
It explains what happens when these roots are uprooted and shifted to other territories. In the West, we buy and sell land as property to be owned and exchanged. This Western construct cannot be transferred to an indigenous people who have lived on their land for thousands of years.
It’s easy for business men like Trump to say, “move to another place”. They clearly are not connected to the land the way the indigenous people are. “Land Owners” who function as businessmen, have not set down any roots therefore there is no inviable attachment.
In the Western world, attachments to “things” that are bought and sold are seldom rooted in the land that produced them, unless it is farmland.
Nowadays, farmers are being extracted from their land, told how to manage their land, what to grow on it, forcibly made to inoculated their animals, given “either/or” laws to abide by, accosted by weather wars and a host of other impediments hoisted upon them by “corporations” who have entitlement, by order of the government, to the land.
Colonizers approach land as a commodity therefore displacing the indigenous from their “homeland” is merely an actionable precursor to the changing of ownership.
Dave Matthews Band - Don't Drink The Water (Official HD Video)
This approach blatantly displays the inherent lack of psychological and emotional attachment to the land they’ve just invaded. This video points out how the Israeli settlers planted evergreen trees for shade and beauty, not for utility, while on the other hand they cut down and destroyed the olive trees.
When you live in a world where everything is packaged and bought in a store, mall or sent via mail order, it seems to perpetuate an inherent disconnect from the source, which includes, ironically, the labor that got that product to the shelves. Couple that with an abundance of packaging to be thrown away, and it seems to even deepen the disconnect and re-enforce a “throwaway” mentality among the consumers.
We as Westerners are robbed of Source conscriptions as we simply buy and sell commodities (like on the stock market), with little or no intrinsic connection to what is bought or sold. I think it causes a certain faux reality of what is actually and truly ours. Even after a so-called “natural disaster”, fundraisers are initiated to replace that which was lost under the guise that if the victims of these disasters have more “things” to replace what was lost, the individuals will be able to quickly remove their sense of loss out of their psyche as that which was lost is replaced with other “things.”
Yet, indigenous people, with intrinsic connections to the land they have been displaced from, cannot simply, relocate and rebuild in a strange environment. Their original environment cannot be replicated by giving them “things”. What is lost is not physical. What is lost is intangible and no amount of “things” can fill that void.
Trump and his comrades could never comprehend that because their perspective obstructs their ability to do so.
I must admit, that I too, actually thought that moving the indigenous Palestinians was a good option, at least it would get them out of the genocide and ecocide that has been perpetrated upon them. I have moved several times in my own lifetime on this planet. It was just a matter of packing up and moving to another location. However, I am also a product of the Western world thus I too have little or no connection to the land under my feet.
I live in a homogenized western environment where I am able to just purchase whatever commodity that I need. In fact, I have made a concerted effort to “not” have attachments to material things. But after watching this video, I realize that my detachment from the natural world around me, may have disconnected me too much thereby causing me to be unable to understand on an integral level, what the indigenous people of Palestine and Turtle Island felt and feel. It had me foolishly thinking that it is just a matter of them moving to another location. I projected my own experience onto them and did not realize how deeply disturbing it is to be faced with the tragedy of having their land made unlivable, then taken over and then being forcefully displaced from it. This video brought to me an awareness of another more deeper nuance as to what is happening to the Palestinians.
Lyrics: DON’T DRINK THE WATER, Dave Matthews Band
Come out come out
No use in hiding
Come now come now
Can you not see?
There's no place here
What were you expecting
Not room for both
Just room for me
So you will lay your arms down
Yes I will call this home
Away away
You have been banished
Your land is gone
And given me
And here I will spread my wings
Yes I will call this home
What's this you say?
You feel a right to remain?
Then stay and I will bury you
What's that you say
Your father's spirit still lives in this place
I will silence you
Here's the hitch
Your horse is leaving
Don't miss your boat
It's leaving now
And as you go I will spread my wings
Yes I will call this home
I have no time to justify to you
Fool, you're blind, move aside for me
All I can say to you my new neighbor
Is you must move on or I will bury you
Now as I rest my feet by this fire
Those hands once warmed here
I have retired them
I can breathe my own air
I can sleep more soundly
Upon these poor souls
I'll build heaven and call it home
Cause you're all dead now
I live with my justice
I live with my greedy need
I live with no mercy
I live with my frenzied feeding
I live with my hatred
I live with my jealousy
I live with the notion
That I don't need anyone but me
Don't drink the water
Don't drink the water
There's blood in the water
Don't drink the water
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