Happy Birthday Deya, Rest In Peace

Dear Deya,

Facebook alerted me that today was your birthday. Happy Birthday. I had always wondered what happened to people's Facebook pages after their owners die. Yours stands as a testament to your all-too-short life and the amazing number of people you touched who are all wishing you happy birthday on your wall today - a year after you died.

Do you remember when we met? I do. It was at a Palestinian heritage event in New Jersey. The lovely host family you were staying with brought you to meet the Palestinian community in the area. That's when I learned about your situation and the Israeli settler's bullet that ripped through your 14 year-old body. I remember that night vividly, there were speakers and music and traditional Palestinian line dancing, or dabke. I remember the hesitation I felt joining the dabke line that night when I saw you across the room. You sat in your wheel chair looking at the dance floor just wishing you could walk again one day. It was impossible for me to dabke seeing this and I remember telling you that night that one day you would get better and join the dabke line again. We became good friends.

You did eventually get better, before you got worse. American doctors performed the numerous

surgeries you wouldn't be able to get in Palestine. Despite the settler's bullet which fractured inside you, partially tearing through your organs and lodging in your spine, the doctors performed miracles and you slowly made progress. The dream of joining the dabke line seemed like it may come true. Eventually, you were able to walk with a limp and as more time passed you slowly regained your stride. But little did we know about the toll all of this took on the organs inside your body. (Image right: Newspaper photo of Deya in one of the first of his many stays in a hospital)

You went back to Palestine and back to high school where you began what we thought would be a promising future despite the years of schooling you missed. You were in love with poetry - I recall you reciting it in classical Arabic as a teenager in the hospital's visitor's room. You loved to sing George Wassouf songs, learned to play the oud, and became an aspiring artist. Eventually you graduated and the teenage boy whose hopes had once been shattered by Israeli settler violence became a man with the world before him.

Soon, though, we heard the news. All the operations you went through couldn't prevent that settler's bullet from sealing your fate. We learned of your liver failing again and your speedy departure to Europe where you may have an opportunity for more surgery or even a transplant. But it was too much for your liver to handle. The last thing we heard was that your blood, unable to be filtered by your failing liver, contained 500 times more toxins than normal and was poisoning your body.

You died soon after, about a month before your 23rd birthday. We never got to dabke together.

They gave you a martyr's funeral in Palestine, even though you were not shot taking part in the resistance. You were merely born Palestinian and walking back from school that day. Which, I suppose, is form of resistance itself. (Image right: Deya, about a year before he died)

Your life, perhaps symbolizing the Palestinian struggle, was a roller coaster of hope and despair, ultimately ending in tragedy.

What happened to you opened my eyes though. As Palestinians, we had always heard and talked about the checkpoints and the wall, the Israeli soldiers, their incursions and bombings, but we rarely ever exposed the issue that took your life; Israeli settler violence. We always had maps to talk about other things, we needed statistics to talk about settler violence.

In your memory, and in dedication to all Palestinian victims of Israeli settler violence, we embarked on a comprehensive study of this on going phenomenon, how it happens, and who it effects. This is meant to shed light on a facet of occupation that occurs on a daily basis but is rarely, if ever, discussed and gives us a basis upon which to have a discussion about it.

In our database, we record victims of settler violence as either injured or dead. For the 9 years after you were shot you would've been classified as the former, but not anymore. I can only wonder how many of the 1,064 Palestinian civilians classified as injured over the past 7 years in our database today will one day meet the same fate as you. (Image right: photo of the martyrdom poster for Deya in Palestine.

We'll be presenting the comprehensive analysis on April 19th, 2011. The least we can do for victims of settler violence is teach people about this problem in the hopes that they will join us in working to end it. I hope you will be watching, from somewhere.

Happy Birthday Deya and Rest in Peace,

Yousef

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