María Suárez Toro,
Feb. 8, 2014
Dear friends, today I could no longer tolerate the atrocious genocide in GAZA and I have declared myself on strike, a civil, peaceful, legitimate and neccesary strike for the love of Palestine and humanity.
I am not going to describe to you what is happening in Gaza because it is the first time in history that we have the victims of a genocide report live and in full color from their borrowed cell phones, telling us what is happening and asking us not to leave them alone. And they are intolerable to ignore.
Yesterday Puerto Rican paradigmatic singer and music producer, “Residente” of the group Calle 13, has stated that no one should receive awards, that we all should reject them in the name of stopping the genocide in Gaza.
I’m not one up for awards. I am retired and everything I do I do for the common well-being of the life of our species, our clans and the Planet, including the inner peace that I have acquired in adulthood from knowing that throughout my life, I have done the best that I have been able to do to try to leave a better world.
Now I’m going on strike, “Resident” is right. I am going on strike for Palestine. I am going to dedicate myself to Palestine and please know that if I am invited to participate in any activity – any activity – they have to give me time to read or say something about Palestine less my silence become a complice of the barbarie.
I will not participate because I’m on civil strike for Palestine.
I am only 75 years old and in that short period of history, I have seen and experienced too many wars, too many senseless deaths because only natural death makes sense, too many disappearances and too many ethnic cleansings. I was even on the near grounds of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and I cried when I saw people slowly throwing themselves out of the windows of the two buildings because there was no way out. And it seems terrible to me that there was a massive assassination of Jewish people who were in the kibbuts on 10/7 and it seems terrifying to me that our indigenous peoples, Afro people and all women, have had our history and maternal and clan lifelihoods taken away from us historically.
But NEVER in my short life have I seen such blatant, sustained and genocidal barbarism, against all life and the reproduction of life, of the entire people of Palestine.
In that context, I cannot continue living, not even one more day in life, as if nothing is happening and as if it has nothing to do with me. Or with you.
Not another day of silence and inaction, not today. Today I go on strike.
What I will do for Palestine in my strike, you might or might not know through the media, but just know that I am only doing the best I can, as an expert in my own voice and choice in my personal life. I am very busy, working with the voice, choice and life of what remains of Palestine with th hope that it becomes part of the concert of humanity’s voice for the love of life.
A poem as to WHY? https://escribana.org/a-prosaic-poem-sphere-of-influence/
I leave you with the two posters that were presented at the hearings of the International Court of Justice trial in The Hague. The white board in a hospital in Gaza, presented by one of the plaintiffs at the hearing… Written by a doctor to his staff when they knew they were going to be raided by the Israeli military. “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story we did what we could… remember us.”
The same white board the next day, when the three doctors were killed and even the white board gun shot multimple times, perhaps so that we forget… or would never know what happened…”
Enough is enough!
