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let's sit down at this cafe, have a cup of coffee and talk about politics.
Love this story….on a recent trip to Palestine as we were biking through the beautiful countryside and enjoying the food and the hospitality of the people I could not help but notice the countless dogs and cats that just seemed to be wandering around on their own. As I asked our tour guide about the welfare of the animals I immediately realized the ridiculous nature of my question as he indicated the folks in Palestine are having enough trouble just surviving with the water shortage and all of the rules and regulations imposed by the Israeli government. This lady is doing a good job in a difficult situation–she has a good heart–best wishes and prayers for her facility, not to mention it shines a light on the situation and the suffering, in general. Shining a light on the suffering in Palestine--dogs and people, too--what about the children. from the anguspost.com:
"This is not about politics this is not religious, this is pure human ethics.”
The war between the Israelis and Palestinians is timeless, and one known all too well by most of the general population. The thought of the two groups working together seems decades away from now. However, a recent situation involving shelter animals has struck the hearts of thousands of readers. The safety and well-being of stray dogs has convinced this community to finally work together.
Just east of Bethlehem, in a town called Beit Sahur, the only Palestinian-run animal shelter in the West Bank was in danger of shutting down last week. A crowd-funding campaign was created through Headstart, in which they were asking for NIS 50,000 in order to keep the shelter running. As of Sunday, August 28th, more than NIS 74,000 had been raised. The most incredible part of all of this is that over 400 of the backers were Israeli.
Thanks to hundreds of Israeli donations, it appears [the shelter] will continue its mission of protecting dogs and cats.
The campaign was started and is hosted by Preserving the Rights of Animals (PTROA), an Israeli organization, which will collect funds, and distribute the money to the Beit Sahur shelter. There are currently 60 dogs within their care.
There are currently 60 dogs at the small Palestinian-run shelter.
The shelter in Beit Sahur is run by a 38-year-old woman named Diana Babish. Before opening the shelter, Diana Babish was the regional branch manager of the Jordan Commercial Bank. She also has a Masters Degree in international cooperation and development from Bethlehem University.
Babish opened the shelter one year ago, in hopes of aiding the homeless animal population of Bethlehem, as the numbers have risen drastically throughout the years of war.
In an interview with Jerusalem Post, Babish described the reason why she believed an animal shelter was necessary for Bethlehem and surrounding areas.
The idea for a shelter came when I saw how dogs are being treated. Dogs are not a priority animal here and municipalities poison them.
Babish searched for a plot of land to build an animal shelter, but was turned down at every opportunity. Eventually, she was able to convince the Beit Sahur Municipality to provide a small piece of land, where she began construction of the animal shelter.
She paid for the construction out of her own pocket.
Preserving the Rights of Animals helped raise enough money to keep the shelter open.
President of Preserving the Rights of Animals, Yoram Erez, stated that Babish “didn’t know what kind of trouble she was getting into,” as the epidemic of homeless animals began to overflow her small shelter.
Within months, she was over $3,000 in debt to contractors, and forced to pay daily for the upkeep of the facility.
Though Diana Babish has been able to cut costs by feeding dogs chicken and rice from wedding services, she is still overburdened with expensive medical bills.
Babish often takes in dogs who are injured or sick, and many are in need of greater care than she can give them. Dogs in need of medical treatment are sent to Israeli veterinarians, where the medical bills add up quickly. One dog’s medical bill was over NIS 45,000. Thankfully, PTROA helped cover the cost.
After aiding Babish with her veterinarian care, they aimed to assist her further by creating the crowd-funding campaign. Yoram Erez believes that Babish is headed in the right direction.
The situation is not good for many dogs and cats in the Palestinian Authority, but I think Diana is the point that we need to start from to make a change.
Yoram Erez and PTROA hope that they will be able to raise enough money to open a larger, more modern animal shelter in place of the one Babish has created. They hope to have an open door policy, where both Israelis and Palestinians will have equal access.
For now, they are working in the field to help homeless animals, while raising money to keep Babish’s shelter afloat.
Animals, whether they are in Palestine or in Israel, have to be helped. This is not about politics, this is not religious, this is pure human ethics. I thank all the people for their love and support.
Will you be listening to music today, cruising through the taco shop on the way to the dog park or the dog beach or working.
Spending so many Saturdays of life working listening to that stupid dr hotdog (yes, name changed to protect the guilty) rant and rave over some made up indiscrepancy to justify his inability to prepare or communicate his technical needs as a surgeon.
In other words, never properly letting us know what he needed to have on hand in order to do the case.
On a recent trip to Palestine one could not help but notice the tragedy of the Roman Ruins as our tour guide shared the story of the Israeli government preventing archaeological excavations in this historic town.
We were literally walking on roman Mosaics--yes, many scientific groups wanted to explore the area but they are barred from making progress and preventing tourism from helping the economy of this beautiful, friendly and historic Palestinian town.
Our guide said as we walked through the ruins of the Roman Amphitheatre, "If you look at the pictures from three years ago you will see that things look different now, there was a wall there and part of the theatre but the Israeli government bulldozed this area to make a parking lot."
This amazing story and sentiment runs through the villages and countryside of Palestine. Their olive groves, centuries old farmlands and simply water for the household are often diverted by the Israeli settlements. Yes, their settlement swimming pools are full as the original villagers struggle to bathe their children.
It is an odd situation and a grave story and one wonders how it is justified.
Trying to get the word out about this land of delicious food, important history and unending vistas of almond orchards and olive trees.
I wish everyone could visit this historic land and learn the story of Palestine.
Highly recommending the Siraj Center and Bike Palestine for an eye opening vacation and adventure.
Please feel free to share your thoughts.......I found this story from the Daily Beast to further illustrate the situation.
Israeli settlers from Shavei Shomron have recently started dumping untreated sewage on the farmland in Sebastiya, a small Palestinian town in the West Bank just north of Nablus. Today, Sebastiya organized its first popular demonstration in 36 years specifically to draw attention to the issue of the sewage contaminating their lands.
“We want to farm our land in peace,” Ahmed Kayed, a resident of Sebastiya and the organizer of today’s protest, told me. “But the settlers are cutting our olive trees, keeping us from our land. Now their sewage is flowing through our land, poisoning it.”
Kayed hopes that today will be Sebastiya’s first of many weekly popular demonstrations like those in Bil’in, Ni’lin and Nabi Saleh. In preparation, he proudly unfurled a sign that read, “This is our land. Get the shit out of here!”
As a village, Sebastiya is known for its picturesque Roman ruins dating back to 800 BCE, making Sebastiya one of the oldest and most historic villages in the West Bank. Before 1967, these ruins were a major tourist attraction of the Middle East. However, since the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) occupied the land, tourism has plummeted with several shops being forced to close, draining the small town’s economy. Once the first Israeli settlement was built in 1975—the second Israeli settlement in the West Bank ever, preceded only by Hebron—the village became characterized by settler violence.
Now it is known for their sewage.
At the demonstration, 150 activists—including Israelis, internationals and Palestinians from Sebastiya and surrounding villages—marched en masse from the village to the valley. On one side of the valley is a grove of olive trees, each of them tagged with a note in Arabic notifying the farmer that it will be cleared. Above the olive grove, the American suburb-like perfectly painted white houses and red roofs of the Shavei Shomron settlement are perched on the highest hill, overlooking the entire valley. IDF soldiers stood guard next to two tanks, midway down the mountain between the Palestinian protesters and the Israeli settlement.
A trickle of sewage flowed like a small creek through the valley’s clearing.
“It is quite obvious that Palestinians in the West Bank are oppressed, and important that conscientious people support them in their struggle,” Kobi Snitz, an Israeli activist from Tel Aviv, told me when I asked him what brought him here. “Especially Israelis, since this violence clearly takes place in our name.”
Despite the stench of sewage, Palestinian Muslim protestors carried their rugs and performed Friday noon prayers on the land in the valley—bowing and murmuring “Allahu Akhbar” while surrounded on one side by olive trees marked for destruction, and on the other by the Israeli settlement responsible for the trickle of sewage and eight IDF soldiers in plain sight with their fingers on the trigger, ready to shoot high-velocity teargas canisters into the crowd.
Once Friday prayers had ended, the protestors—waving Palestinian and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine flags—advanced up the side of the mountain, drawing kuffiyehs over their mouths and noses in anticipation of the onslaught of suffocating teargas from the IDF soldiers. True to form, the IDF soldiers responded by firing teargas canisters—routine for a West Bank demonstration—sending protesters running back down the mountain and away from the clearing, crying, coughing and spluttering the suffocating gas out of their eyes and mouths, leaving their land filled with the clouds of noxious teargas and the ever-present stink of sewage.
