"Um Tarik"a is an 84 year old Palestinian woman in Rafah who has lived through many occupations of Palestine. Bearing witness to the ravages of colonization is nothing new for her. She has confronted British occupation after WWI and, in the later phase of her incredible life, the Israeli colonization. Living in Rafah, under any circumstance, is problematic and difficult. It is an extensive array of refugee encampments, made up mostly of cinder blocks and tin roofs. It has an open sewage system, little access to potable water, and is juxtaposed with modern Israeli settlements, checkpoints, and military installations. Everyday is a challenge, a challenge to survive and maintain dignity. "Um Tarik" lives in a refugee camp in Rafah. Three generations of Palestinians have been born from her love-10 children, over 60 grandchildren, and close to 20 great grandchildren.

During the Nakbeh of 1948, when Jewish militia forces ethnically cleansed over 800,000 Palestinians from their villages, towns, and homes, she was giving birth to children in an UN issued tent. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians called these tents "home" for many years after 1948. "Um Tarik" is living in a tent again, 56 years later in Rafah. She has lost her home for the 4th time since 1948. When the Israeli occupation army destroyed her home with an American-made Caterpillar bulldozer during the most recent assault, she was given the same kind of tent . The Israelis would not let her move in with her extended family and told her if she did move in with them, that their homes would be destroyed too. She has pitched her tent on the rubble of her destroyed cinder block, tin-roofed home.

Despite these crushing assaults to her existence, "Um Tarik" wakes up every morning, does her morning prayer, bakes fresh bread for her family, takes breakfast, and then proceeds to negotiate the daily humiliations of the Israeli colonization of her land. The day is punctuated with American-made F-16's and Apache helicopters buzzing overhead, the din of the Caterpillar bulldozers and machine gun fire, and the pervasive smell of diesel fumes. "Um Tarik" is every Palestinian's mother, grandmother, sister, and neighbor. She is steadfast, proud, and resolute about her connection to Palestine. She is the embodiment of the Palestinian sensibility about life. After the recent slaughter of 10 Palestinians by an Israeli tank that fired into a crowd of civilians, most of whom children, during a non-violent protest against the Israeli Occupation Army, she asked her son how to translate the word "troubling" into Arabic. She just heard about George Bush's statement that the murder of Palestinian children was "troubling" to him. George Bush had refused to condemn it.

Palestine is a killing field for the Israelis. The killing is wanton, indiscriminant, and viscous. The killing does not discriminate-women, children, and old men are targets. This past week a house was bulldozed with people inside, killing all of its inhabitants. Palestinians would rather die with dignity in their homes than be forced out and humiliated. Close to 600 children have been killed by the Israelis since September 2001. During the month of May in Rafah over 43 Palestinians have been murdered or assassinated by the "only democracy in the Middle East", and 1500 more Palestinians have been made homeless yet again. It does not matter to Palestinians that Amnesty International has condemned the Israeli actions in Rafah as "war crimes" or that the United Nations has characterized them as "crimes against humanity", or that the entire civilized world has condemned Israel for these naked acts of aggression. These are empty words, empty proclamations and they offer little comfort. The Rafah "crimes against humanity" are nothing new for Palestinians.

"Crimes against humanity" perpetrated by various Israeli forces against Palestinians have a long history, well over 56 years. These crimes are part of a systematic attempt to dislocate, dismember, and dispossess Palestinians from their homes, from their land, from their culture, from their history, and from each other. Palestinians understand this project as a deliberate attempt by Israel to remove any trace of Palestine and its people from their indigenous rooted-ness to the land. The Israeli project is to create a "purely Jewish" state through colonizing the land of Palestine and ethnically cleansing the land of anything and everything that is Palestinian. The "War on Terror" is simply the latest cover for this project. This project of "purity" is completely supported by the Bush administration (and all other previous administrations) and is intimately linked with the larger Imperial aims of the United States to manage and control the natural resources, markets, and slave laborers of the greater Arab World.

People committed to social justice do not see any difference between the occupation of Iraq and the occupation of Palestine. The aims are the same, the methods are the same and the devastation is the same. Palestinians, and the Arab and Muslim World in general, understand clearly that the problem is neither George Bush nor the Republicans (neither John Kerry nor the Democrats for that matter as there is no difference between them with respect to the belief in the Empire). The problem is not Ariel Sharon, nor Likud, or the Labor Party (for there is no difference between Labor and Likud with respect to the concept of a pure Greater Israel). Imperial beliefs that seek to re-draw the political, economic, cultural, historical, and psychological spaces of the Arab World and beyond are the basis for understanding the occupations of Palestine and Iraq. This project uses colonization of land, natural resources, markets, and labor as the primary method to re-draw theses spaces. George Bush and Ariel Sharon's messianic visions of the New American/Israeli Century are simply the current manifestation of this project.

This is why George Bush can only muster the word "troubling" when asked if he would condemn the Israeli atrocities in Rafah. For George Bush, Palestinians and their children are getting in the way of these imperial dreams and wishes; they are impediments to the New World Order. The carnage in Rafah was so ugly that many Israelis have even condemned it. The Israeli MP Yousef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, characterized the Rafah actions as reminiscent of what his grandmother went through in Germany during the Holocaust. The word "troubling" is nothing more than the thinly veiled racism that exists in all colonizing projects and imperial methods of conquest. When Palestinian children are killed it does not have the same value or humanity for George Bush when compared to the children of the Empire or its surrogates. When Palestinian and Iraqi children die, it is only "troubling".

The use of the word "troubling" to describe the death of Palestinian children is truly retched. The depth of the moral depravity was so searing that it left the Arab and Muslim world breathless. Palestinians now believe that their confrontation with extermination and existential crisis is not a human concern worthy of George Bush's Empire or his Israeli accomplices. I don't know how to translate "troubling" from Imperial English into Arabic. Perhaps the only translation of "troubling" that makes sense is, "we don't care".

Jess Ghannam