One step backward

When I take a step back, I am not losing against the occupation. I must write it down to keep it in my mind.
The children from Tuba, the shebab and the Palestinians have taken many steps backward, but they have never given up. To carry out resistance, you must be patient and forward-looking. Taking a step back and then taking a thousand forward tomorrow. Because it takes a thousand to get that road back. But they need to be done at the right time.
The other day the Israeli soldiers threatened us to stop the Palestinian children they were escorting. They escort them to school, to protect them from Israeli civilians who attack them with stones, sticks and knives.
We had to move, to take a step back; exactly one step behind the wall, the one that marks the "border of Havat Ma'on", the land of the settlers. That step backward has a profound meaning, it means they want that land, free and Palestinian, to become a barren piece of the settlement, full of racism and violence. Anger, frustration and helplessness. But children must go to school, they have to study, they have to take that step forward with the leg that the occupation has been trying to amputate for years: education, playing, social relations.
Taking a step back, the children arrived and the soldiers left.
To achieve small successes in this moment, you have to step back a few meters.

But let's not despair friends, let's be patient, let’s wait and organize ourselves. The time will come when we make progress, and in that moment, we will have to use powerful legs, full of desire for redemption and freedom; ready to take back the stolen lands, trampling on the soldiers' rifles and the settlers' knives. Openly challenging those who have decided to dedicate their lives to the oppression of the weakest, to the law of the strongest, showing them the infinite joy that one feels in fighting for everyone's freedom, even for their own.
“They are the real victims” Ahed tells us, tall and proud, “they have built prisons in which they locked themselves up. We as Palestinians continue to sleep with the doors open, despite military raids, checkpoints and shootings."
Soldier, settler, rifle and knife: the heart and legs will chase you away.

L.