Merafat remembered
original was 15" x 18"
This painting won Peoples Choice Award in the Corvallis Fall Festival Fine Arts Show. SOLD Available as gicleé print on cradleboard |
"Merafat Musa Rabai was 12 the morning when the hot tears of rage fell on the dry dust of her grave. It was 12 November, 2007. Her family were my son's neighbors in the tiny, goat-herding village of Tuwani, where he was a human rights worker.
Through a sleepless night they'd driven a beat-up Peugot from one understaffed Palestinian hospital to another, panicked and dumbfounded by her labored breath and convulsions. Merafat died in the arms of my son's friend, Musab, her uncle. While bullets and bombs did not bury this Palestinian flower, the stark truth is that Israel's military occupation did. Merafat's Israeli colonist neighbors were not being deprived of ambulance service, driving hours of hazardous back-roads to avoid being arrested or shot, nor did they see their civil infrastructure cruelly ripped apart over fabricated, internationally disproved associations with terrorism. My son said, 'I've seen no greater terror than through the eyes of occupied people. Merafat died alongside 1,437 innocent children whom Israel's army killed since 2000 (according to the Israeli group B'Tselem in Jue, 2009).'" |