Samar al-Hallaq was killed with her 4 and 6 year old sons in the shelling of Shija’yah Gaza. Photo: Provided Last week in Halifax Nova Scotia, Christians, Jews and Muslims marched together for Peace in Gaza and Israel. Its what Canadians do when it becomes clear the people who are supposed to represent all of us determine its politically expedient to only represent some of us, or worse, remain silent.
No stones where thrown, no tear gas fired, no one died. Just Canadians gathered to share the gift of each other together, that those who also share their gift know they are not alone in the night.
Halifax Christians, Jews and Muslims march together for Peace in Gaza
Last March, I published a story about Telecomix Canada and the November 2012 bombardment of Gaza prior to the annual Atlantic Security Conference, where I was presenting on Cyberwar.
Together we anonymously help civilians and independent journalists pilot encrypted Internet back channels, such that they can discretely exchange uncensored multimedia, e-mail and data from inside conflict zones without revealing their physical network location or their transmission destination. It is grim and often frustrating, but so far remains legal in Canada and helps terrified people find out if their families have been lucky today.
Our work isn’t very momentous. Still, I proudly shared our story because we continue to honour our promise to make sure the un-censored civilian catastrophe of war continues to trump any pretense about the right to wage war in the darkness in the digital age.
Summers, upon again failing to restart my career or find an editor willing to pay me write about Tech, I try to idle down my bridge and endpoint and refill my heart at my market stand as the harbour sun beats my face red. At my stand, everyone chats with perfect strangers and together we ignore the world while we share the finest sausage and fresh farm greens this Country has to offer.
Though our back channel is an equally inconsequential node in a great inter-network of things, together we have come to plainly understand that we really all are much more alike than we are different and how fundamentally decent human beings all over this planet can be, given a chance to share each others time together.
Still, I know I speak for our entire promissory when I say we wish we never again have to light our waypoint every time we idle it down. Today we will try to help you to understand why.
The Wedding Singers – a Palestinian History Tapestry Project
This week, Samar al-Hallaq, a maker of tapestry in Gaza, was killed with her 4 and 6 year old sons in the shelling of Shija’yah, leaving behind a gravely wounded husband who does not yet know his wife and young family are dead and may himself die before he is told.
She was 29 years old and organized Palestinian women trying to feed their families in the face of the now seven-year-long Israeli trade blockade of Gaza by creating and exporting indigenous Arab needlework through the Palestinian History Tapestry Project, a charitable NGO based in the UK.
The work is an ancient craft wherein the women of Palestine express their dreams and lives using the literacy of the loom and the thread. It is a language of geometry and art, literally created to rise above the walls imposed by language and the passage of time.
Samar al-Hallaq held a bachelor’s degree in English Education and worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency before joining the Palestinian History Tapestry Project, having been introduced to the effort while her husband was studying at Oxford Brookes University in England.
I still believe in the great human leap forward that the establishment of state of Israel represents. That Israel came to exist means, was meant to mean, that weaving race war amongst unarmed civilians will be acknowledged and redressed.
And despite the personally shattering acceptance that, like ourselves, Israel too has come to be governed by a generation of leaders agreed that it remains politically expedient to represent some, instead of all, their peoples. I always will.
They say every new generation is trapped in the baggage of their fathers. That is the windmill Samar al-Hallaq and thousands of women exactly like her quietly, invisibly, tilt at every day.
And make no mistake, for their own people as much as the Israelites, Hamas really are every loathsome inch the thugs and psychopaths IRA and UVF militants were when I was about Samar al-Hallaq’s age.
In the futile act of firing unguided Korean era pipe rockets as target practice for 21st century Iron Dome engineers, Hamas deliberately means to ensnare another generation of suicide bombers while our own respective institutions and leadership morbidly attempt to weaponize unarmed civilians trapped in retaliatory fire as Human Shields.
Education – a Palestinian History Tapestry Project
But the subtlety of that byzantine narrative is for the most part unimportant to women like Samar al-Hallaq, who daily empower the change they want to see across this lonely planet.
Every morning children wake up needing to eat and drink fresh water and learn and parents do what they have to make sure the kids don’t go hungry today.
The single most powerful thing the modern global internet does is help provide new land for the willing and the brave to escape our baggage traps.
And we would happily, gratefully, give anything if our nodes and bridges came to again be used for that work instead of chronicling the collective human failure that is war amongst the children.
The Palestinian History Tapestry Project, like thousands of other entrepreneurial driven micro-projects slowing gaining traction worldwide, attempts to crest the baggage and offer an alternative to fanatics like Hamas and Bat Ayin.
They aspire to barter blankets instead of rockets, olives instead of guns.
Like my own project under the harbour sun here in Halifax, they work together to create a place where perfect strangers find and share each other and try to refill their hearts in a world where Samar al-Hallaq and her family are shelled to death because, somewhere, in Shija’yah there were Terrorists.
Being powerless to stop it, we continue to share the brutal witness when all sides fail to recognize each others simple right to exist and refuse to find any other way in hope that people who will an can come to weep as deeply as we do for Samar al-Hallaq, a maker of Tapestry.
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