Words from Palestine

The writings which follow were put together to foster awareness of the human cost of injustice in its many forms, but primarily the form it takes as military aggression. A number of the stories contained on this page were written while the author was in Iraq-January through May of 2003. They are about the author’s experiences with real people-average Iraqi citizens, peace activists, and American and Iraqi military personnel. The stories are, more than anything, real. They are about real people. They are about real human interactions.They are about the real emotions which inspired the stories to be written.
Due to the circumstances in Iraq during the first part of 2003, some of the stories written never made it out of Iraq and the original writings are lost. Circumstances also made writing extremely difficult at times. In the case of the former, I have recreated the stories as closely as possible to how they were originally written. This has not been difficult at all. These stories, like the people who enliven them, never leave my thoughts for very long; nothing is forgotten. When things were not written that should have been, and would have been in better circumstances, I have written for the first time here. In both cases, I have noted origins of the writings in the text.
I hope the reader finds some inspiration in these stories, some hope in these stories. But for the people who are these stories, the people of Iraq, I hope the reader experiences a kinship and recognizes the suffering masses of people in distant lands to be, in a sense as real as the stories contained herein, the sufferings of our brothers and sisters.

The first thing to be disrupted by our commitment to nonviolence will not be the system but our own lives.
James W.Douglass